Posted on October 28, 2005 - by deCadmus
Whither Goest Google?
In July I switched from Blogger — a publishing platform I’d been on for more than five years— to WordPress.
Bloggle had always enjoyed pretty amazing search relevance at Google… without any particular effort on my part to optimize things. However, within days of switching platforms, traffic arriving from Google started falling off, despite my efforts to carefully redirect a few resulting changes with permanent (301) redirects as recommended by Google… and today Bloggle appears to have been all but abandoned by the engine.
Anybody else switch away from Blogger and find they’ve been shut out of Google?
Curious…
I should add that the number of folks visiting Bloggle — despite the Google embargo, and my, er… inconsistent frequency of posting — has never been higher. So, thanks for stopping by. ;)
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Hello.
Bloggle is the online playground of Doug Cadmus, a usability guy, writer, photographer and sometime dramatist who moved to Vermont for the coffee. When not writing, reading or walking his old, blind golden retriever, he roasts coffee in his garage and is the Web Guy for Green Mountain Coffee in Waterbury, VT. Flickr Photos
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October 28, 2005
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It may not be just the move — Google has been tweaking the formula they use to show their results for the past few weeks, and traffic has been all over the place; a couple of my sites have gone up, others have gone down, and then every few days it changes again…
Apparently this is going to be going on for another few weeks, so it’s anyone’s guess where we’ll all and up…
Good luck in the new location!
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October 28, 2005
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My personal blog (www.intersplice.com.au/blog) dropped from a PR6 to a PR4 since I moved to WP.
Main reasons are this:
1. New RSS feed addresses
2. Old posts, when imported into WP from Blogger, lose their original URLs. The new ones need to be re-indexed.
3. With the change in addresses for your old posts, Google may not have yet indexed the new pages or assigned importance to them based on links from other sites (which may still be pointing to your old posts)
First thing you should do is generate a Google sitemap doc.
Email me if you need help with that ok?
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October 28, 2005
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Doh!
Chuck: Right you are… Google does seem to tweak the math all the time. My only issue is that it’s all been trending inexorably downward.
:(
Rob: Thanks! I needed a whack on the side of the head… I’d started the Google sitemap process more than a month ago (got the XML generation all set up on my site) and then *failed* to complete registering the sitemap at Google itself.
Done, and done. We’ll see what turns up. ;)
Thanks, again.