Curiouser and curiouser.
I mentioned yesterday about the sudden downturn in visitors coming in from Google, wondering if maybe Google had redone their search protocols to highlight or otherwise favor Blogger/Blogspot blogs (that they now control), and just now got the following comment from Mike Hollihan:
I had noticed the reverse on my blog, at about the same time. I've been away from mine, posting maybe once every three weeks or so for a while, and traffic had drifted down to nearly nothing. Suddenly, I had a ton of referrals from Google and Google image searches showing up and daily traffic doubled. Not sure what's going on.
Well, now that's mighty peculiar. I also went back and checked and of all the results I have managed to get from Google lately, the overwhelming majority came as people were clicking through from my old Possumblog site on Blogspot that hasn't been active in almost two years.You know, one of the things that made Google popular in the first place was the sense that it was more reliable at returning a broad variety of pertinent search results with little bias toward one viewpoint or another. It seems counterproductive to that image to start goofing around with things in favor of sites bearing your own brand.
And once they start doing that, what's to keep them from pushing aside politically unpopular Blogspot bloggers in favor of the more lefty/lib/progressive sorts who seem to be more of the mindset of the Google corporate office?
Well, not much.
Have any of the rest of you noticed a sudden upturn or downturn since mid-April in visitors referred by Google?
Posted by Terry Oglesby at May 8, 2007 02:58 PMTerry,
There is another aspect to your question: has "mu.nu" changed THEIR policies re allowing search engines access to their blogs? I know at least one other host did so, and some people left them because of that--their blogs were no longer showing up in search results. (The blog host I heard about did so because of a desire to conserve bandwidth.)
Posted by: Stan at May 8, 2007 05:46 PMTerry,
I have a blogspot blog that has a mirror WP blog.
Two weeks ago I did a post on the funeral of Mary Karen Read one of the VT students.
Go to google and enter the words Mary Karen Read.
My blogspot blog is #1 at page 1 of google searches for those words.
My WP blog? Not in the first 8 pages of google searches. I did a cross post to Bullwinkle blog of that same post. BW is also WP.
Not in the first eight pages.
Google DEFINITELY gives preference to blogspot.
Bill
Posted by: The Florida masochist at May 8, 2007 07:15 PMCorrection-
The correct google search words for my blog to be #1 is Mary Karen Read funeral not Mary Karen Read.
Bill
Posted by: The Florida Masochist at May 8, 2007 07:17 PMStan, I'm not sure, but I doubt it. There are various scripts to ward off spiders, but as far as I know, mu.nu does not have a policy to prohibit them from crawling all the various mu.nu blogs. Could be wrong, but there seems to be enough trouble with fighting spam to make me think they don't aren't disallowing any search bots.
And hey, there, Florida Masochist! Although Doc seems to think there's nothing to it, at least anecdotally it's becoming clear both from folks commenting there and here that something happened in mid-April to suddenly cause Google searches to Blogspot blogs to spike upwards at the expense of non-Blogspot blogs.
Again, it's no skin off my nose since I don't do this for ad revenue, but I still found it odd.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at May 9, 2007 10:01 AM