Google Maps Mania
My attention was drawn today that knowcal was mentioned in Google Maps Mania.
Many thanks to whoever made the suggestion to those in charge.
August 13, 2006
August 01, 2006
Knowcal back on Google!
After leaving knowcal alone for a month, the devastation caused by the Google slump has now passed with the number of indexed pages back up into the 40,000 range.
The result of the slump/re-index can be seen in the graph below:
This graph charts the page views per day, and clearly shows the effects of the slump recorded last month (the second trough).
Interestingly, Google indexed over 500,000 pages last month (July) sending my bandwidth useage sky-high, but I have yet to see these appear in the index. Time for more waiting I suppose!
June 27, 2006
Good news, Bad News and Agency Theory in practice...
My Google site index has dropped from over 40,000 to just 800 in the space of a week. The traffic to my site has dropped to a trickle and the revenue is down substantially. That is the bad news.
The good news is that Google is finally indexing the new links (as shown by the date header on the Google results) so it looks like the index should be going up again (hopefully).
I was getting worried that I had been banned for some reason - maybe the Ajax background loading of pages, but hopefully I have just been 'sandboxed' whilst the index sorted itself out.
No more messing with the site now - I am definately going to sit tight and see what happens.
This shows the real risk of relying on one major partner for your business. In my case, with Google currently bringing in the majority of the traffic, I am in trouble if they drop me from their index. I am also using Google Adsense and Google Maps, so a ban on these would also cause me great problems.
This is a high risk strategy for any business and as Google becomes even more powerful it does worry me that they may start to use that power to create the sort of Internet they want, rather than what the 'poeple' want - I am, in many senses, a competitor to them as they have their own local search product. How long before they take exception to this and kick off all their competitors?
June 26, 2006
New structure
Whilst traffic (from Google) has gone quiet, I have taken the opportunity to restructure the URL's as some of them were causing problems.
For example, ampersands have now been replaced with the word 'and', spaces (which appear as %20) have been replaced with a dash, and dashes (in place names such as Stoke-on-Trent) have been replaced with an underscore.
All these changes should (!) make them more search engine friendly and easier to read. Importantly, they are backwards compatible with the old URL style so current pages in the search engines will still work.
Now I will have to sit tight for a few weeks (or months) whilst the search engines catch up and build a new index from the fresh links. I expect my current page index count to drop and then slowly rise again, hopefully bringing back the large quantities of traffic I had a few days ago.
One can hope!
June 23, 2006
The Google Slump strikes!
Oh dear, I knew things were going too well!
The number of pages Google has indexed has been steadily gorwing, from 400 a few weeks ago to 20,000 last week to (as of yesterday) 48,200. My visitor numbers had also been steadily growing in response to this and, with adsense now optimised on the site to the best of my current ability, my click-through-rate and revenue had been increasing rather nicely.
...and then Bang!
Looking at the stats for the last 3 days, my visitor numbers have been dropping for the first time since launch - currently down around 65% from the peak. This seems very odd, but I notice many others have experienced the same phenomenon.
Having racked my brain, the possible reasons for this slump could be:
1) At the end of last week I redesigned the front page to include more category links as these seemed to be the ones that Google ranks most highly, and those correlated closely with the search terms bringing people to the site.
2) I also disabled my sitemaps as they appeared to be interferring with my stats (although that is probably nonsense).
3) The site was down for a few hours on Monday whilst I was out (Mr Sod and his damn law at work again) which did not go unnoticed by the google sitemap reports (which carry on working, even with no sitemaps listed!).
To get things going again (hopefully) I have reinclude the sitemaps and made provision to reduce the chances of the site going down again (the problem appeared to be a scarcity of disk space and java memory).
The main lesson to come out of this is to be patient. Changes to the site can take weeks to be finally reflected in Google's index so tweaking the site in future needs to be done in small stages, measuring the impact contnuously until things settle down before making the next change.
I will now sit tight to see what happens in the next few weeks.
