The lesson I've given myself today is a reminder that I should never put all of my eggs in one basket. In this case the basket relates to traffic sources. Oh, and another other thing as well is that I mustn't get too complacent.On lots of my blogs my biggest referrer is Google and it was driven home to me that this is a little dangerous. Fall out with Google, or if they dramatically alter their algorithm, and my traffic could take a dive.
A while back I wrote how, on my blog about television presenter Konnie Huq, the traffic collapsed when the blog was no longer on the first Google search page and their referrals stopped overnight. Not only that but AdSense would no longer appear.
As far as I can see it wasn't anything I had done. Konnie Huq made a comment about human rights in China and I quoted this in a post. This brought me over 4000 hits in one day and most were from China. They left hundreds of vitriolic and obscene comments about Konnie.
Google mustn't have liked this so bang went the blog's search engine placing - it disappeared completely and referrals stopped as did the AdSense ads.
Things for the blog have now improved slightly and I get Google referrals again now and just this week I've been able to get AdSense ads on there again.
But now I've had another blog hit! I was getting about 700 average hits a day and half of these came from the Google search engine. Wham bang, overnight all of these referrals disappeared completely and from a steady 700 hits a day the blog is now getting just 350.
If this second blog will correct itself in time, I've no idea.
To me though the message is clear: Don't rely on one major source for traffic and continually work at finding new avenues that will refer hits.
To get things in perspective I've got over 50 blogs and this has only happened to two of them. I find it annoying, however, that there are powers out there that hold the success of blogs in the palm of their hands. Nice to use a good cliche!
But it makes life interesting. Get behind me complacency.
Good luck,
Mike.
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