jon
CibbuanoDon't make sudden large scale changes to your Blog
October 3rd 2007 04:46
A blogger contacted me yesterday asking why Google had suddenly stopped sending her blog traffic. After a bit of questioning I discovered that she had added a number of new categories and had then gone through all the posts on her blog (a couple hundred) and had added them to these categories.
This has the effect of creating a large number of new pages very suddenly. Not only does each new category create a new page, but each new category combination creates another new page if there is a single post that is in both of them. So after creating just 5 new categories she had effectively created around 100 new pages which was about a 50% increase in the overall number. Changing the name of a category (even just one letter) can have the same effect.
Such sudden and large-scale changes (in relation to the number of pages already on a domain) can put off the search engines because they think that such a large amount of new content can't possibly be genuine or useful and so write it off as spam. Good original and useful content is time consuming to produce so they assume that it's usually done slowly. In the real world there are of course exceptions to this rule, however Google has to make simplifying rules to have any chance of crunching the numbers. If you fall outside the rules, however well intentioned, too bad.
Orble's combinatorial category system can be very powerful in attracting SE traffic but you do have to be careful with how you use it.
There are a number of rules to follow to make sure your blog does not suffer the same fate:
1) You can add any number of categories at once to your blog as they will not actually show up until you put a post in them. What you should not do is go through all your old posts at once and add them to a new category. Such changes should be made very slowly, perhaps one old post modified per day.
2) Do not add a post to more than 3 or at most 4 categories at once.
3) Do not add a large number of posts to your blog in one day. By large I mean more than 5. The exception is if you add more than 5 posts every day and always have done. Consistency is the key. If you need to ramp up the number of daily posts you are making do so gradually.
4) Do not make big changes to a large number of posts in one day.
5) Do not delete a large number of posts in one day. If you need to delete a large number of posts do 3 or 4 a week.
6) Don't change the names of your categories. If you absolutely have to change a category's name then it's better to create a whole new category and move the old one into some sort of category graveyard. If you need help doing this post a comment below and I'll show you how it's done.
The basic point is -- sudden and large-scale changes are bad! Try to avoid these and you should stay in Google's good graces. Once your site has been penalised because of large scale changes you probably won't get much google traffic for 3 to 6 months.
This has the effect of creating a large number of new pages very suddenly. Not only does each new category create a new page, but each new category combination creates another new page if there is a single post that is in both of them. So after creating just 5 new categories she had effectively created around 100 new pages which was about a 50% increase in the overall number. Changing the name of a category (even just one letter) can have the same effect.
Such sudden and large-scale changes (in relation to the number of pages already on a domain) can put off the search engines because they think that such a large amount of new content can't possibly be genuine or useful and so write it off as spam. Good original and useful content is time consuming to produce so they assume that it's usually done slowly. In the real world there are of course exceptions to this rule, however Google has to make simplifying rules to have any chance of crunching the numbers. If you fall outside the rules, however well intentioned, too bad.
Orble's combinatorial category system can be very powerful in attracting SE traffic but you do have to be careful with how you use it.
There are a number of rules to follow to make sure your blog does not suffer the same fate:
1) You can add any number of categories at once to your blog as they will not actually show up until you put a post in them. What you should not do is go through all your old posts at once and add them to a new category. Such changes should be made very slowly, perhaps one old post modified per day.
2) Do not add a post to more than 3 or at most 4 categories at once.
3) Do not add a large number of posts to your blog in one day. By large I mean more than 5. The exception is if you add more than 5 posts every day and always have done. Consistency is the key. If you need to ramp up the number of daily posts you are making do so gradually.
4) Do not make big changes to a large number of posts in one day.
5) Do not delete a large number of posts in one day. If you need to delete a large number of posts do 3 or 4 a week.
6) Don't change the names of your categories. If you absolutely have to change a category's name then it's better to create a whole new category and move the old one into some sort of category graveyard. If you need help doing this post a comment below and I'll show you how it's done.
The basic point is -- sudden and large-scale changes are bad! Try to avoid these and you should stay in Google's good graces. Once your site has been penalised because of large scale changes you probably won't get much google traffic for 3 to 6 months.
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