For a while now I
have noticed my number of referrals listed down there at the bottom
of the sidebar has not been changing. I wondered what was up with
that. Then I noticed, as I scanned my articles, that the referrals
for all my recent articles read zero. Now I'm getting really
suspicious.
Last night I did
some poking around. All of my articles (except the one on Google
Bombing I just posted last night) are indexed. I went to
Google and typed in some
keywords from my more recent articles. None of my articles came up in
the first 30 results. (I have Google set to give me 30 results at a
time.) I found that odd. In the past JoeUser articles tended to rank
toward the top. My articles are indexed, the keywords are in there,
why wasn't anything showing up? I varied my keywords. I tried
searches I was convinced should return my articles as a result.
Nothing.
I started adding
"gene" or "gene nash" to the search. Finally something showed up.
Here is the curious part. I was getting the same result for all my
recent articles: my
blog's main page. The individual articles were not showing up as
results. Very odd.
I poked around
some more. I checked out Gideon's
blog. He has not had a referral from a search engine since an
article posted on August 3rd. I looked back through my articles. I
also have not had a referral from a search engine since, not
coincidentally, an article posted on August 3rd. Curiouser and
curioser. I checked out Brad's
blog. His most recent referral from Google was last Thursday
August 12th,, but it does come from the forum version of the article,
not the one served up as part of his blog. The last article I can see
of Brad's that has a Google referral that points to the actual
article is from August 6th.
After my odd
experience with trying to get my article to come up in a Google
search I decided to check out the progress of our JU Google Bomb on
Fred
Harteis. Nothing. I put "Gideon" in the search to force the page
to come up. Same results as my blog: only his main page was listed,
not the individual article. That's not good.
During my research
for the Google Bombing article last night, I happened upon a
page
claiming Google Bombs were basically dead and making a big deal
about a "Google update of July 16th." This got me to thinking. I
wonder if Google made a change to their system on or around August
3rd that seriously affected the way our blogs are indexed. Checking
the JoeUser.com pages that contain "Fred Harteis" shows all the
articles (well all the articles that have the date of posting visible
on the results page) were posted prior to August 3rd.
As my total
referral thud shows, not having the individual articles indexed as
before, if Google has truly made this change, is going to have a
serious impact on our individual traffic. I find this fairly
distressing.
Do you think they
have changed how they index our articles? Have you seen a decline in
the frequency of your search engine referrals? Have they dried up
completely?