Thursday, April 21, 2005

What the heck just happened?

Something odd has happened with my site. The number of visitors is way down since Tuesday - from an average of 25 a day to an average of less than 10.


Sitemeter daily visits for Another Monkey, March-April 2005 Posted by Hello

This isn't just an odd dip, maybe a result of people searching on words like "Pope Benedict XVI" instead of "cathy baker hee haw" or "whiplash the monkey", which were two of the most popular search strings for my site. No, my site isn't even showing up in Google searches for these strings anymore.

I'm wondering if Google did a re-indexing this week and somehow missed my site? Or if I've been intentionally de-indexed for some reason?

Another odd thing: used to be that whenever I would post, there would be an immediate flurry of visits from people using the "Next" button on the Blogger toolbar. I haven't seen that happen after I've posted these last few days.

I know I'm still being linked by a handful of sites - IndustrialBlog, Virtual Jen, Puppetdude3 (and the related Dunstablog and Party Games), Sammie's sdfsdf.wox.org, Chloe's Watermelon Punch, SuperG's My Distractions In This Modern Age, and Gareth's Another Chance To See, as far as I know. Google says that the best way of making sure your site is indexed is to have it linked by other sites. But I don't understand how that works, either. Google never seems to notice the link from Sammie's site. And I know that a mention on Chloe's site a few months ago seemed to kick me from "not showing up on searches" to "showing up on searches". Chloe's site seems to be loading very slowly these days...I wonder if the link from her site is more heavily weighted in the Google rankings than the links from the other sites, and maybe the problem isn't with how Google sees my site, but hers? But daily visits to her site seem to be staying pretty consistent.

Interesting...while checking out my status at BlogShares, I saw this message:

STATUS: Spider Issues - Come chat in #blogshares (Chanstats).

So it looks like something is up with the Google "spiders" ...I just haven't figured out what yet.

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