More Traffic Woes

It seems I was right - the good traffic of a few days ago was just a blip. As of yesterday we were back to square one. Not just an unbelievable crash in visitor numbers compared to the day before, but also we seem to be back to irrelevant porn search terms bringing this desultory traffic from Google. Oh, and Google appears to have stopped indexing my pages. Again. Today's results were even worse. To say that I'm disappointed is to put it mildly. I really am sick and tired at seemingly being at the mercy of the Great God Google's whims. It's obsession with the idea that webmasters are somehow trying to 'game' Google's search engine for better results is making traffic building damn near impossible for smaller sites like The Sleaze. I wouldn't mind, but most of the problems experienced with search results are, arguably, the fault of Google anyway. The relentless focus its AdWords scheme places on identifying and targeting 'keywords' is what drives more and more webmasters to pack their sites with what they are being told are he best keywords for their niche. Not only does this distort search results, crowding out those of us actually producing original content designed to be read by humans, but it also ensures that the web is increasingly dominated by sites full of poorly written and uninformative content, designed purely to rank highly in search results.

The irony, of course, is that far from us 'gaming' Google, it is them who are 'gaming' us by constantly moving the goal posts and forcing us to jump through hoops just to get our sites indexed properly. All we want, and all, I'm sure, that the average web surfer wants, is a search engine that returns results purely on the basis of relevance to the search term used. I really don't think people care about page rankings, the 'authority' of linking sites (a purely subjective judgement), the fact that a site takes a fraction of a second longer to load than the result above it, or any of the other increasingly meaningless 'metrics' that Google apparently uses to produce what it claims are 'better' results. If Google's algorithms really are making search results 'better', why is it I still have to wade through acres of crap before I find a relevant result when I search? (Yeah, I know that in the last post I promised not to bang on about traffic again for a while, but I'm afraid that Google has really pissed me off this time...)