website traffic
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Around the time that I last made a journal entry on the subject of traffic to this website, I found that the traffic had started to taper off. I looked into what was going on, and found that this site was no longer appearing on google.com searches. Looking into the matter, I found in their "Webmaster's Tools" area that my site appeared like a link-spammer to the powerful search company.
This was because you could find the same content by two routes. For instance, the perennially popular speech I gave at my grandfather's funeral is available at http://emuu.net/?0056 and was also available at http://emuu.net/index.php?0056. Because the content was identical (as well as the header fields) on more than one page, Google deemed my site one of those that puts up the same (low-value) content on many pages. It therefor dropped my site from active listing. This duplication turned up as a result of the redesign that I launch in August.
So I fixed the situation. I made the longer URL redirect to the shorter one with a "302 Permanent Relocation" header. Also, I reinstated the full collection of header fields so that keywords and other content aspects were better represented.
Then I added a Google analytics code blurb to the bottom of the page. I did this so that use of my site could be tracked, and so that I could see how the site was being used.
Lastly, I used the "Google Webmaster Tools" to create an XML site map that helps the search company index my site properly. It turns out that my site now contains around five thousand pages with actual text content (in addition to maybe six thousand photos that have no text captions). I still don't know how many ways there are to find a given photo on my site via navigation (e.g. via photo collection, the "all photos" collection, or in a list indexed by equipment). But I ensured that anything without a caption got axed from the immediate indexing that Google does.
The net result is a four-fold increase in traffic, with daily counts exceeding six hundred page views a day. For some reason, my humble collection of tattoo designs still isn't getting 1/10th the traffic it got before this summer's redesign. Maybe closer to 1/50th. I rewrote the descriptions of the designs themselves, and they are certainly in the same organizational layout as before. I'll have to watch that space for a while.