Curious Crash

I discovered a curious thing yesterday.  Accidental Verbosity had been steadily getting close to 300 hits a day, mainly from Google, some from other searches and residual links to the blog or to pages on it.  I was pleased with that, as it gave it some value as a potential ad venue, if only to advertise things of our own like Deb’s shop. 

Meanwhile, at the almost a year old new blog, we’re still working on breaking 100 a day, and most of the hits are repeat ones from people close to us.  Add to that a few stalwart if less continuous readers, the relatively rare search hits, and odds and ends, and you have our current traffic.  Still, if text link ads hadn’t gone the way of the dodo, between multiple blogs there would be a fair amount of page rank and a bit of traffic to justify said ads.

Then yesterday I couldn’t find a post at Accidental Verbosity, even by entering the exact title in Google (this one, which has now been reposted here).  Since I use that method to find stuff I’ve written, and have found that same post with Google before, it was shocking.  Checking Site Meter there I saw this:

Click for the full size, which is just a tiny bit larger but still might be clearer.

There was an abrupt drop, about the 13th or 14th.

We didn’t get sandboxed, as most of the traffic remains from Google.

Page rank remains 5, which is decent, and which we have also achieved here.

It looks like an algorithm change, or a crawling change that misses part of the content.

The interesting thing is I believe the dropoff coincides with my last change to the templates.  I recently added a template with Deb’s Etsy shop, embedding it to show at the top of the sidebar on all pages there.  At the same time, I noticed that individual post pages still had text link ads on them that I thought I had purged several months ago, when they expired unrenewed.  I really miss that $500 a year.  I fixed that.

Boom!  Google crash.

If anything, they should have hated us for the link ads.  And they changed their algorithm to discount heavy numbers of links on a page long ago, so I would have expected a problem with the huge blogroll sooner.

I just don’t get it.

Posted by on 07/31 at 11:21 AM

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