Blogging Trends
Google HATES My Blog : STALE-Mate Leads To Check-Mate
Been watching your blog's traffic dwindle down a death spiral this past week? Google's 'Fresh' update may be cutting hard and deep - and it's your fault. Complacency may be killing your site's traffic - especially if you're in a trendy or newsy niche.
It isn't just neglected blogs that are seeing traffic drops. Even static pages can suffer for two reasons:
#1. Fresh, time-stamped content is being given more visibility in the top of Page 1 search results. As such, other formerly high-ranking keywords may be getting pushed further down the page - or off to Page Two.
#2. If you haven't tweaked or 'freshened-up' your static pages in a long while - GoogleBot knows that nothing's changed - and as such may devalue it and consider it 'stale' content that is no longer worthy of being included in the Zen of 'Be here, Now' search results.
I'm sure the SEO Gods and Pro-Bloggers are already coming up with 'What You Can Do NOW to Survive Google's Fresh Update' posts. And maybe you should too. Cuz unlike some other quirks to Google's algo that weren't fatal - this one seems to have sharp teeth.
If you don't have 'skin in the game' (especially if your sites don't have true SEO authority like the Top 1000 do….) and prove you're an ACTIVE participant in content generation, well down the ranks you'll go. With no changes to a page's checksum since last crawl, or clearly abandoned blogs revealed by last post time-stamp -- Googles found an elegantly simple and brutal way to separate the chaff from the wheat so to speak - and cast a million more websites into the dustbin of dusty irrelevancy.
Back to the drawing board kids. It's time to revive that old blog with a sequence of new posts. Time to go over some of those long-neglected static pages and give 'em a fresh coat of paint… 'Publish - or Perish!'
It isn't just neglected blogs that are seeing traffic drops. Even static pages can suffer for two reasons:
#1. Fresh, time-stamped content is being given more visibility in the top of Page 1 search results. As such, other formerly high-ranking keywords may be getting pushed further down the page - or off to Page Two.
#2. If you haven't tweaked or 'freshened-up' your static pages in a long while - GoogleBot knows that nothing's changed - and as such may devalue it and consider it 'stale' content that is no longer worthy of being included in the Zen of 'Be here, Now' search results.
I'm sure the SEO Gods and Pro-Bloggers are already coming up with 'What You Can Do NOW to Survive Google's Fresh Update' posts. And maybe you should too. Cuz unlike some other quirks to Google's algo that weren't fatal - this one seems to have sharp teeth.
If you don't have 'skin in the game' (especially if your sites don't have true SEO authority like the Top 1000 do….) and prove you're an ACTIVE participant in content generation, well down the ranks you'll go. With no changes to a page's checksum since last crawl, or clearly abandoned blogs revealed by last post time-stamp -- Googles found an elegantly simple and brutal way to separate the chaff from the wheat so to speak - and cast a million more websites into the dustbin of dusty irrelevancy.
Back to the drawing board kids. It's time to revive that old blog with a sequence of new posts. Time to go over some of those long-neglected static pages and give 'em a fresh coat of paint… 'Publish - or Perish!'
