The first thing I did after finding out that Google was hating on me was to sink into a pit of despair. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and I was starting to pride myself on being someone who was able to give out SEO advice to other bloggers. All of a sudden I’d suffered the opposite of search engine optimization: search engine demoralization.

My husband said, “Hey, it least you didn’t lose all of your traffic. I think it shows what a loyal readership you must have.”

What a wise man he is. I’d like to thank you, loyal readership.

Then I decided to ask Shane for some advice. He took a look at my HTML and realized that the content of my blog didn’t actually start until 2/3 of the way down the page. He guessed that perhaps the Googlebots were getting halfway through my page, looking for an actual blog post, and then just giving up. Googlebots are applications that that crawl the web, looking for content to index. They then return the information they’ve collected and it becomes integrated in Google search results. The problem is that sometimes you have too much gobbledy-gook code in your HTML, and the bots look at it and say “nevermind!” and move on to the next website.

So the problem was in my Wordpress theme, and more specifically in my layout. Remember my three columns of idiocy? Not only is the three column a bad idea design-wise, it’s also a nightmare for SEO. So I switched back to my old Wordpress theme because I knew it was better optimized for Google.

But I changed Wordpress themes in January. So shouldn’t my traffic have dropped in January, rather than in May? What happened in May?

I was working on Orientedx3 a lot in May. I’m worried that Google is interpreting it as a link farm, which is not what I intended it for at all. Also, I have this habit of coming up with new domain names and installing Wordpress on them in the hopes of starting a new blog. I usually abandon them when I realize that I barely have enough time to write this blog. I’m kind of the queen of unfinished projects. I have over a dozen domain names - some day I’ll show you the list and I promise you’ll get a kick out of it.

Anyway, I sometimes insert a link to PixelRN in these unfinished projects, just to see what the link will look like. So now I’m worried that Google might also think I’m a splogger. (spammer + blogger = splogger). A splog is an “artificially created site which the author uses to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites.” It’s a fake site with links on it.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that I have no way of really knowing what happened. The only thing I can do is change my theme, get rid of any blogs I’m not using and just start posting again. Only time will tell if Google decides to love me again.

There is a silver lining to all of this. I have decided to take one of my little unfinished projects and finish it - which means I will be starting a new blog! I’ve been working on it all weekend and I hope to launch it soon. In the meantime I’ll keep posting here in the hopes that Google will show me some love again.