For some reason, it seems like my blog has largely disappeared from Google. I was previously getting significant daily traffic from searches on all kinds of topics (Message Broker, TomTom, and car tax being the favourites). As of yesterday, that fell to a trickle. I took a quick look this morning, and it is nearly impossible to get my site to come up on a search.
I know that the Google Dance happened recently, and it looks like I’m still listed on their datacenters – but for some reason my posts are no longer hits for specific search terms.
Here’s the irony – yesterday the blog appeared in a presentation at Lotusphere based on the stats growth, and also broke the 40k ranking mark on Technorati for the first time.
Back down to earth with a bump – from ~1000 hits/day to just over 300 yesterday. After all the excitement, it looks like I’m in for a lean period 🙁
Technorati tags: Google, Google Dance, search, traffic, blog stats, statistics
Readership is a really tricky thing. A week after The Beast launched his blog he spotted a story on Drudge about a very odd-looking dog that had been killed nearby in Maine that cryptozoologists were describing as some sort of “Mutant Beast”. He wrote a jokey column on it, based mostly on the fact that his blog is called “The Hairy Beast”. Thin gruel but one works with the inspiration he is given at the moment he is given it.
Google picked it up and within twelve hours The Beast Blog was inundated with thousands of hits! It took a week or so but eventually the hits tapered off.
Six months later Google has yet to repeat this kindness, but the Beast Blog has grown slowly by dint of other venues. It’s no suprise your blog is doing well because it is very well written – you should be able to get along without Google. The Beast found you from a comment you left on Ted Dempolous’ “Blogging For Business”.
Rather than close with some inane “Keep up the good work” comment The Beast will tell you that whenever he reads blogprose that makes him wince and say to himself “Gee, why can’t I write so smoothly?” he knows he has found a good one.
THB
Hear, hear! 🙂
THB, thanks for your very interesting comment, and your kind words about my writing. I’m certainly working on building readership in other ways than a dependency on Google. Ted’s book is excellent for building ideas on how to do that.
I am still baffled by the disappearance from Google. A search on site:andypiper.wordpress.com shows that the blog itself is still listed. Each of the category / tag pages is listed, but individual posts and search terms don’t seem to be. Weird.
Let’s talk about pain, son. 148 hits for me today.
Why go on? 😉
More on this.
I’m still the top hit for my name on google.co.uk, but don’t show up at all on google.com
There’s a thread over on the WP.com forums where it has been suggested that my domain name change may have affected things, or that I’m in the “Google sandbox”.
Whatever is going on, it’s weird and annoying. I’m going to sit tight for now.
I believe wordpress.com installed an update (2.1) about the time your problem showed up. When I upgraded, my cutline template did not work properly – there was a third column containing my links and blogrole.
If you drive through Northam near the old Meridien TV studios you may have noticed the name of my main website on a shop sign (soon to be ammended with just URL & description).
creditmarket.co.uk (no hyperlink, this isn’t for marketing! change it if you like!)
The site was dumped by Google a couple of years ago during the ‘Florida’ dance and hasn’t made it back since. It’s still in the index just not ranking. Had top 5 place for ‘loans’ and ‘credit cards’ and was a very happy affiliate!
I’ve recently rebuilt the site using wordpress and a few plugins and Google now has a lot more statistics to display in my ‘Webmaster Tools’.
Been playing around with SEO for a few years, know all about the pain!
I’ve been reading same problems of other bloggers that they have encountered with Google and some of them have lost their articles completely. Though nobody has ever discovered yet how it came about.