Ups and Downs

It's been a turbulent week one way and another. The Sleaze has been experiencing all manner of technical problems - most of them my fault. On Sunday, whilst attempting to post a new story, I succeeded in taking the whole site offline. Luckily, I was able to restore it after fifteen minutes of panic. A subsequent problem, which surfaced late last night, is, I'm sure, related to the earlier incident. To cut a long story short, I found that all of the page redirects (where pages had been renamed for various reasons) had vanished, resulting in a lot of 404 errors. Like a lunatic, I then sat up for half the night restoring them, resulting in me feeling exhausted all day at work. Yeah, I've got my priorities right! Returning to the root cause of all this trouble, the new story, I'm happy to tell you that it was worth all the hassle. Kick Ass Jesus took off in a big way on Monday, delivering the best day's traffic in a while. Interestingly, the source of the traffic wasn't search or Google News, but Facebook, where somebody had posted a link to it. I had a similar success with Confessions of a Sex Murderer (coincidentally, a similarly exploitation movie themed story), a few weeks ago, with Twitter rather than Facebook.

These two stories represent the first time I've had social networking sites deliver such significant levels of traffic. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to harness their undoubted power as traffic generators on a regular basis - as far as I can see, I'm reliant upon someone with a lot of friends/followers posting my stories. Of course, such success couldn't go unpunished, and the latter half of this week has seen Google strangling traffic to The Sleaze again. It really does feel as if I've exceeded some 'quota' of traffic that Google has decided that I'm allowed, so now they're going to make sure I'm on 'bread and water' for the rest of the month. Google's continued abuse of their dominant market position really is becoming most tiresome. Let me make this clear Google, I've been on the web longer than you have and I have no intention of leaving anytime soon. I know that I'm not a big brand, or a commerce site, or any of the other types of site you can squeeze revenues from, but tough. I'm not going to be forced out of business by you. As I've outlined above, recent events have clearly shown that there are sources of traffic out there with the potential to deliver far more visitors than you ever have. All I've got to figure out now is how to tap that potential.