Updated – Just got home from several hours of meetings this evening. What an enjoyable day off 🙂
All of my sites except for this one have been dropped to PR0 now, but it’s the same for some of the bigger guys such as Techcrunch as well, so whatever Google is doing has broken some serious shit. Hopefully whatever it is will get fixed soon.
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It’s interesting to see what’s happened with some of my visits since Google decided I am an asshole.
This is a screenshot from one of the counters I use. Historically, compared to Sitemeter, Google Analytics and AWStats ZExtreme only seems to record about half of my actual visits, so the numbers themselves should be doubled but it should give you an idea of what I am talking about. I suppose since I have paid links links and don’t use the nofollow tag like they think I should, I have been bumped like 50 places on any and all searches that might bring people here. Joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck. The only searches they seem to let through are from images.Google.com and I am getting ready to block that shit.
I am torn about the whole thing anyway. Has the content gotten worse? No, not necessarily. I still post the same old crap except that I think maybe it’s improved slightly. I post more often and write longer. I am getting like ten times the amount of comments than I was prior to that, and THAT’s what blogging is all about for me anyway. The participation and communication between people.
The only part of the whole thing that sucks is that it DOES effect my income and I don’t like the fact that Google is basically telling us that the only relevant paid links or searches are those which IT performs and if all your base don’t belong to Google, then you are dogshit. So am I taking down my Google AdSense advertisements on the sidebar? Nope, they are still performing, although slowly. I am considering giving in though and adding nofollow back into all of the links that I can.