End of the Week Ruminations

The end of another week, and it has been a real up and downer for me. I don't want to dwell on the shitty parts, so instead I'll just mention the election of Barack Obama in the US and Spurs beating Dinamo Zagreb four nil in the UEFA cup as two of the highlights. I also had a moment of brilliant insight during which I finally pinpointed the main underlying reason for the site's drop in traffic over the past few months. It occurred to me that I hadn't seen many vistors from India or Pakistan lately. An analysis of my traffic logs revealed that, since June when the nosedive in traffic started, visits from the Indian sub-continent have all but dried up. Prior to that, I'd been getting significant numbers of visitors from India and Pakistan, most of whom clicked on multiple pages, pushing up the total page loads. It's the loss of this traffic which has pulled down the totals for the past few months. Ironically, over the same period I've actually increased the number of visitors from the US and UK, but not enough to compensate for the loss of Indian and Pakistani traffic.

Of course, the question remains, where has all the traffic from the Indian sub-continent gone? Well, most of it was generated by searches for 'Hollywoodsex' or 'Hollywood Sex', both of which would bring up the story Hollywood Sex Pests on the first or second page of Google results. Now, whilst this search still gives this result for my page on Google US and UK, on Google India and Pakistan, the story has dropped down to the fourth page. Consequently, fewer perverts from these countries are seeing it, as they don't bother to go that far down in their search results. A couple of years ago I had a similar experience, although on a smaller scale, when a story which was getting a lot of hits from Saudi Arabia vanished from the indexes of one of the biggest Saudi search engines. So, what do about it? Probably, not much. The reality is that the US and UK represent my main target audiences so I'd rather concentrate on building these up than trying to recover this lost Asian traffic. Nevertheless, I have tinkered with the meta-tags on the page in question, which might help push it up in the Asian search engine rankings. We'll see if it has any effect over the next week, or so.