Back to Square One...

So, here we are, back to square one again.  The latest Google update seems to have completely wiped out any remaining organic traffic I was getting from them, both at The Sleaze and here, even though this is a Blogger blog and therefore a Google property. Not that I'm alone in this situation. Not remotely.  A huge number of sites have seen their traffic vanish over the past couple of weeks of this update.  This time, it is particularly frustrating, as over the past couple of days, traffic was building back up - nothing spectacular, but definitely on an upward trajectory.  Then, today: literally nothing.  The fact is that before this latest update, traffic levels were back on the up - which is possibly why I've been hit so badly by the update: from experience, I know that no good fortune online goes unpunished by Google, who seem to feel that they should be the sole arbiters of online popularity.  The thing is that other search engines, (yes, there are search engines other than Google out there), seem to love my sites.  Duck Duck Go, Bing, even Yahoo drive a fair amount of traffic my way.  The trouble is that so few people use them for searches compared to Google - which dominates search and seems determined to abuse its near monopoly.  All of which makes the situation all the more frustrating: clearly there is an audience out there for what I do, but thanks to Google's domination, they just can't find it via searches on the web's dominant search engine.  

All of which leaves me contemplating, once more, as to where do we go from here?  Is there any point in continuing to create content that Google makes sure nobody can see?  Of course, I'm not in the position of relying upon my online witterings for income, unlike many who have been hit time and again by Google's traffic-killing updates.  My sites are there mainly to satisfy my creative urges.  Not that that makes this situation any less tolerable - creative output without access to an audience feels like banging your head against a brick wall.  There is part of me that wants to see this as an opportunity - I've been thinking about winding down The Sleaze for some time now, there have been times of late when creating content for it feels a chore.  But, on the other hand, it has been online for twenty two years now and is one of the last survivors of that turn of the millennium wave of satire sites, when us amateurs and small fry still dominated the web and traffic was freely available.  I still have a sentimental attachment to the old site, although there will have to come a point where I'll have to decide if it is worthwhile me still paying hosting fees to keep it up when nobody is visiting it thanks to Google.  This blog, on the other hand, costs me nothing to maintain, so I have no problems in keeping this going for the foreseeable future.  There's always the chance, of course, that traffic could pick up again, either from Google or other sources.  It has happened before between Google updates, or maybe people will start realising just how poor Google's search results are, in terms of actually turning up relevant sites, and instead start turning to other, better, search engines.  Perhaps there will be a new entrant to online search, that delivers better results.  Who knows?  I certainly don't, which is why I'll be waiting a little longer before making any hard and fast decisions about my sites.

Apologies for serving up another of these introspective posts, (but hey, it's surely better than the political rants), but I sometimes feel the need to work through issues like this by putting them down on paper, so to speak.  Not to worry, though, I've recently been indulging in a fair amount of obscure pop culture stuff from some new sources so, hopefully, normal service will soon be resumed.