This site has been floating along for a little over 6 years. It started as a collection of hand-edited HTML files with some PHP to allow comments, changed into something more like a single-user forum before turning into a blog four years ago. In those four years I’ve tried 4 different blogging packages and two different hosts. I’ve gotten in fights, said a lot of things I regret, and written somewhere around 500 entries. It’s been a lot of fun.
Two years ago I realized that I had a healthy amount of search engine traffic, so I added some Google ads to some of the pages. Not because I wanted to get rich off of the site, but because I figured that if I was going to have my bandwidth eaten up by visitors from Google, I might as well make some money off them. (Not that I ever really made any money: in two years I’ve earned $148.80.) And since I’ve noticed that very few of the searches that lead people to my site seem to match the content they find here, I figured that maybe Google’s ads would be a win-win: they might link to the what visitors were really searching for.
Then last year I realized that I had a pretty great Google page rank of 6. I was getting emails every few weeks asking me if I would place a link on my site in exchange for a few hundred dollars. The money seemed good, but the way I was approached was a little seedy. About 6 months ago I signed on with Text Link Ads to sell links in my sidebar. It seemed pretty harmless: I get about $45 a month, and some other sites get a link. (So far I’ve made $272.93, better than Google AdSense, but no reason to think about quitting my day job.)
I started posting again on this site in earnest back in August. I managed to double the amount of traffic I was getting, and I restored a couple hundred articles that had been lost when I tried upgrading my old blog software last year. I was feeling pretty good about the site, so I downloaded a bunch of plugins that were supposed to optimize WordPress for search engines. I started checking my site statistics every day to see what I could do to draw more traffic. I even briefly flirted with adding two other sets of ads (since removed).
While I was hoping to make a little cash from my blog, what I really wanted was to increase my readership. It’s not that I don’t like writing for the six of you who comment (I love you all!), but I write about a lot of things that I find interesting that nobody I know seems to care about. It’d be nice to connect with some more people who share those interests.
Of course, I’m not so proud that I can’t admit that the main reason for blogging is vanity. Not “hey look at me, I’m hot shit” vanity, but “this is neat, and so am I by extension.” As a male of reproductive age, showing off is wired into my personality. I get that. And since I don’t play sports or drive a fancy car, blogging about something cool I saw on YouTube is one of my only outlets.
But all of the above is just a prelude to what’s actually wearing on my mind: I’ve lost half my page rank. About a week ago, Google updated their indices, and a lot of sites that were a PR 6 like this one dropped to a 5. That sucked. But now it appears that I’m on a downward slide. I hit 4 on Monday, and as of yesterday, TangleBones is a 3. In addition, Google seems to have lost or removed any inbound links to this site. So a link:tanglebones.com search turns up nothing. Yahoo! still has over 1800 pages that link to me, but Google has deleted those references.
There’s some talk that Google is punishing sites that sell text links, and if so I don’t know what to do. I hate the idea of losing my page rank because it means that my site will drop further down the listings of Google’s search results. It makes the site harder for people to find, and will seriously reduce the number of visitors. I like the money from the ads which I’ve been using to subsidize my comic book habit, but I love seeing the graph of my traffic going up. But since nobody really knows what’s going on with Google, there’s no telling if that’s the real reason I’m slipping in the rankings, or if changing things will do anything to improve the situation. (Another reason for my love-hate relationship with Google.)
So now I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know what I wanted to do. And of course, because Google is trying to stop people form gaming the system, they can’t tell anyone how their rankings work. Worst of all, I agree with their secrecy, while at the same time I want to know what to do.
So that’s how my Halloween is going. How about you?