Due to a Lack of Interest...

...I can't be bothered to make a proper posting toady. It only seems fair, as nobody can seem to be bothered to visit The Sleaze today. This really is becoming dispiriting. However, I feel that this is the only proper response - if people can't be bothered to read The Sleaze, (despite a new story being posted), why should I waste my time writing original material? The sad thing is that I actually had a post planned for today, but after looking at the daily stats, I've lost all enthusiasm for it. Mind you, my mood isn't being helped by the fact that one of my main stats services is lagging by 42 minutes, which rather undermines its usefulness as a real-time measure of web traffic. I wouldn't mind, but these lags are a regular occurrence, not that those running the service will admit it. No other stats service I've used has ever lagged like this. It really is a piece of shit - avoid it like the plague!

Getting back to the original point, there's little doubt that Google and its bloody algorithm changes lie at the root of the ongoing decline in traffic. They really do seem determined to drive smaller sites off of the web by denying them decent search rankings, regardless of the quality of their content or relevance. I wouldn't mind, but I've always played by Google's own rules when it comes to search optimisation, yet, over the past two or three years, they've decided to shit all over me. It's notable that currently Google has more pages of The Sleaze indexed than ever, but clearly it is either not including them in searches at all, or ranking them so poorly they don't appear on the first couple of result pages. Which begs the question, why, if you are a search engine, do you bother to index pages you won't serve up to users? Interestingly, last week Google were trying to get me to use adwords again, about the same time traffic started to dive again. Coincidence? Am I being paranoid? If I was to reactivate my adwords account, would I see an upswing in traffic? I guess I'll never know as I have no intention of using adwords again - it is utterly useless with regard to sites like The Sleaze.