Bad Omens

I had another one of those dreams the other day - the ones which I wake up from with tears in my eyes.  It doesn't happen often, but occasionally I have a dream so intense it creates this kind of emotional response.  To be honest, I can't really remember much about the dream itself, only that it had to do with a friend I once harboured unspoken feelings toward.   The dream had something to do with them either getting married or renewing existing marriage vows, or something like that.  Anyway, in the dream I seemed to take this as a sign not only that my feelings toward them would never be resolved, but that somehow my entire friendship with them was over, leaving me with a feeling of deep loss.  A feeling which lingered for some time after I woke up, until I shook off sleep completely and reassured myself that it was just a dream. 

I suppose that what the dream was about, (if, indeed, dreams are about anything, which I doubt), is the need to know when to let go of things in order to save oneself too much hurt.  Interestingly, of late I've been encountering the notion that when something in your life, not just relationships, but projects too, is obviously over, then you should just let it go.  Most notably, in several podcasts I've listened to over the past couple of weeks, people have talked about how they accepted the demise of earlier projects which, they felt, had run their course.  All of which leads me to wonder whether the universe is trying to tell me something - is it time for me just to give up on The Sleaze?  The sad fact is that traffic right now is dire.  Things seemed to be picking up significantly over Christmas and New Year, but then a few weeks ago the site seemed to get caught up in Google's latest 'Panda' algorithm update, (a series updates designed to punish webmasters who have committed undefined misdemeanours, which, in reality, seeks to de-rank smaller sites from their most popular searches and transfer the traffic they should be getting to either big brand sites carrying Google ads or sites owned by Google), which has all but killed our traffic completely.  Right now, for instance, I've had one visitor in two hours!  Not so long ago I would have been expecting ten to fifteen visitors an hour, generating twenty or more page views. 

What makes this situation all the more ludicrous is that the two stories I published this week were extremely popular, but today the traffic they generated has vanished completely.  I've said it before and I'll say it again - these are not normal traffic patterns, they are clearly being manipulated by Google.  Sadly, as Google dominates web search, there is little that I, or the millions of other site owners seeing their work destroyed like this, can do about it.  Once Google takes it into its head to force you off the web by stopping you from ranking for any popular keywords, there is no way back, t seems.  Cutting my losses and starting again seems the only option.  I have little to lose as, it seems, Google has put The Sleaze back to where it was thirteen years ago when I started it, in traffic terms.