Where Have All The Readers Gone?

In the last year and a half, the traffic to this little blog has plummeted. There were two distinct drops. They were sudden and well defined. Both times, it was as if a switch had been thrown – and it had.

I might claim that the number of readers is unimportant, but it has bruised my fragile ego.

There are a few probable reasons. Some of you (hey – even me) use software like Adblock Plus. I count Google AdSense impressions. If you don’t see the ads (I don’t), I don’t count you. Some of you catch this blog on its RSS feed. You’re not counted either.

These only account for a small portion of the drop. My logs show the real story. The majority of loss has been on my archived entries – traffic mostly driven by Google.

Google doesn’t think I’m as important as they once did. I’m not 100% sure why, but I have an idea. I’m not getting as many good inbound links.

Some of you have your own websites. I see them when your comments are posted. Unlike some other sites, I don’t exclude your links from being followed by Google.

So, I’m going to ask a favor. Would you add a link to my site from somewhere on yours?

This is a small site. A few well placed links would make a huge difference.

13 thoughts on “Where Have All The Readers Gone?”

  1. I understand the fragile ego thing–I, myself live off of blog comments…of course after taking a year off from my blog I’ve found most of my faithful (3) readers have pretty much dropped off the face of the earth.

    As for the link Geoff, yours was about the second one I added to my page as I read your blog everyday.

  2. i remember when you first came to ct. of course being slighly younger than you , that when i watched you on tv i thought you looked like david byrne . i always wanted you to get a string of boring weather and do the ” same as it ever was ” move. over the years you became geoff and not david , you have a warped sense of humor as myself you are the only weather i now watch and i love your blog. it would be a privilege to add you to my favorite sites on my home page http://www.davidfazekas.com

  3. Google changed the method of how they rank things on their search. Have you done SEO on your blog? I don’t know if MT has a plugin that will do that for you or not (WordPress does).

    I believe SEO is an important part of Google’s ranking system now.

    I have a link to you on my blog… It’s right in between “fsckin w/ linux” and “Justine Ezarik” (aka iJustine) on the left side (the heading is “Friends, Enemies and Bloggers”).

  4. Last year when Google introduced their blog specific search (blogsearch.google.com)they began indexing blog archives differently. Now they only index archives back to June 2005.

    They say they switched to this method in order to index blog postings quicker than a traditional web page. My guess is that when they made this switch, older blog archives that were excluded had an affect on search results and traffic to many blogs.

    Thus your original 2003 posting about carrot top shirtless is almost impossible to find – unless you create a new link today pointing to that article in your archives. Now that we’ve mentioned it here a few times, I’m curious to see how soon google picks it up, and what they do with it.

  5. Oh, the Mysteries of Google!

    It’s amazing that Google’s search ranking criteria, with such an enormous impact on commerce, is so fundamentally mysterious — and unaccountable.

    You’ve written about Big Brother before — but we all meekly accept that Google’s Web rankings, which directly affect not just fragile egos but billions of dollars, is the secret purview of Google and Google alone.

    Imagine a similar situation with the NY Stock Exchange — where the value of stocks on the NYSE was a closely guarded secret and immune from regulation or oversight.

    I would call for Congressional hearings on Google rankings, but I’m afraid that Google would find out and suddenly make my adwords campaign inoperative — or my Web site disappear from Google search altogether.

    And if that happened, there would be nothing (other than getting on my figurative knees and meekly pleading with the Great God Google) that I could do about it!

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