A Funny Thing Happened...

A funny thing happened earlier this week: traffic to The Sleaze started to rise again.  Sure, it wasn't anything like the levels we were enjoying a few years ago, but a definite improvement over the trickle we get nowadays.  Most surprisingly, the increase seemed to be originating with Google referrals!  What had happened?  Had Google abandoned its mission of the past few years to destroy the web as we know it by rigging its search results to divert traffic away from smaller, independent, but relevant sites, to big, but less relevant to the search query, brand names?  Sadly not, but a quick investigation revealed something interesting.  When the most recent story - Send 'Em Back - auto-published early on Monday morning it was quickly picked up by Google News.  So far, so normal.  But then something strange happened.  Instead of just indexing the new story, Google News proceeded to index about forty old stories, (which it had already run on their original publication), from the same category, 'Politics', as the new one.  A further check of the stats confirmed that it was these stories which were generating most of the new traffic.

Now, I knew this wouldn't last and, as I expected, Google has spent the past couple of days feverishly removing as many of these stories from the News listings as they can.  Traffic, naturally, declined and, today, is back down to the trickle of referrals we've become used to over the past few months.  (Although, a lot of other site owners have reported big Google traffic declines today, so maybe something else is also going on).  But I think we've learned something important from this incident.  Firstly, that there is clearly something wrong with Google's web crawling and indexing system.  Secondly, it has confirmed that The Sleaze's pages are, in the regular search index, being buried so deep in the results by Google that searchers can't find them.  As the past few days have shown, when stories are allowed a more prominent position, searchers can find them with relevant search terms.  Moreover, the fact that many of these new visitors proceeded to stay on the site and read other stories implies that there is still an audience online for our kind of content.  Which is reassuring, because the way traffic has been apparently ebbing away, I was beginning to doubt this.  However, it seems that Google has to 'fix' its index in order to suppress our traffic.  It isn't us, it's them. 

Anyway, I'll hopefully be posting another new story early next week, probably in a different category - I'll be interested to see if we get a repeat performance of this week or whether, as I suspect,  Google has fixed this indexing bug.  Whatever happens, I renewed the site's hosting package the other day, so I'm afraid Google will be disappointed - The Sleaze will be around for at least another twelve months.