Why I Haven’t Posted in a While…
Google is a fickle beast. And, unfortunately, it’s the fickle beast that controls the Internet. If you somehow offend the beast, you’re dead in the water.
Apparently, that’s what happened. And I’m still at a loss for how or why it happened. Below is a screenshot of my traffic pattern for the past two months from Google Analytics.
What do you see here? I’ve been working hard on this site since late last summer. Initially, it didn’t get a lot of traffic, and that didn’t bug me too much. I figured after I’d written a decent amount of content I could go about working on increasing connections with other sites and getting some more traffic.
Around the beginning of the year, though, I started to do ok. Daily visits slowly rose through January and February. In March they grew again with a series of articles on camera buying, and there was a nice peak when one of my articles drew some traffic from Reddit. I was beginning to think that all the time I invested in this site was going to be worth it after all…
Then, mysteriously, on March 18, it all stopped. My site existed in the Google index. If I searched for “site:digital-photography-howto.com” I could find it. But, if I tried to search for any of the search queries that used to bring up my site within the first one or two pages of search results… I was nowhere to be found. I clicked through 100+ results (10+ pages), and my site just never appeared.
Why? I don’t know. Somehow, I still get a few visits from Google (like a handful a day), but it’s clear that something is wrong and my site has been blacklisted. I requested that it be reconsidered through Google Webmaster Tools, and I’m not sure yet if that will help or not. We’ll see. I’ll post a few things throughout the month and see if there’s any improvement, but I haven’t posted anything for the last few weeks because it seemed futile. Why bother to write anything, if no one can find it on Google?
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Comments
Tell us what do you think.
Your last post prior to this was March 16th. Your traffic fell off March 18th. Coincidence? I think not. You said you don’t post because no traffic is coming in. Let me tell you a secret… no body wants to read old material. If you don’t regularly update, you won’t have traffic. it is as simple as that and your own experiences validate this.
That would make perfect sense – if you’re talking about a long term drop off. But in two days? Doesn’t make sense. Most of the high traffic articles were long term, search engine reaping posts anyway… which suggests that either I got blacklisted by Google or was victimized by the recent algorithm update.
Either way, it hasn’t picked up much. Google is a fickle beast…