Are You There, Google? It’s me, PixelRN. (part 1)
So how did I find out that google wasn’t just knocking me down a few notches but was completely ignoring my blog?
I started searching for key words that I knew Google should rank me high for (like nurses on twitter). Google did not seem to acknowledge that I had written that post. In fact, Google was ranking some of your blog posts that linked to my post, but was ignoring the actual post itself. Hardly seems fair, right?
So I decided to confirm my suspicions by checking my “google juice.” Here’s how you check your google juice: Choose one of your blog post titles that is fairly long and doesn’t contain any cliches. Pick a phrase that you are fairly certain wouldn’t show up anywhere else on the web, except your blog.
Copy and paste the entire title in google and hit search. If you chose a good title, and have a reasonably well positioned blog, your blog should come up at number one for the search.
Here’s an example: Take “Now they don’t want my blood…” from DisappearingJohn. Google it, and DisappearingJohn’s blog shows up at number one.
Google likes Disappearing John, and rightly so! (he’s a great nurse blogger.)
So I did this google search for some of my own titles and that’s when I realized that Google wasn’t listing my blog for any search I could come up with. As Shane put it, “Google is really hating on you right now.”
I decided to take a closer look at my stats. You know when you check out all the funny keywords people use to get to your blog? Well, it turns out the only keywords that were being used to get to my blog were “PixelRN,” or “pixelrn.com.”
(Yes, some people actually put PixelRN into google to get to my blog rather than putting it on the address bar, *ahem*, Mom. But I digress. I don’t care how you get to my blog, as long as you show up!)
I then checked to see what percentage of traffic was coming to my blog via search engines, and at what point in time did it drop off. Here’s what I found:
So as you can see, my search engine traffic seemed to drop off drastically some time between May and June of this year, and in September, it got even worse.
In part 2, I’ll try to figure out what I did in May, 2008 to offend the Google Gods.
I'm a critical care nurse, and a social media evangelist. Find out more 
I just love your Judy Blume reference in the header.
What a great book. But I digress. Hope your traffic improves soon!
Caroline — September 28, 2008 @ 1:47 pm
Glad to see you caught the Judy Blume reference!
Beth — September 28, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
Hey I’m a guy and I caught the JBlume reference. My first rx was, “Um, perhaps Google isn’t the best place to go to help you understand these confusing times of change…” LOL!
I read some of your prelim analysis on Twitter..it just seems more than a little ODD that 1) this kind of stuff isn’t more transparent, and 2) such inocuous oversight(s) can result in such drastic results. I mean there’s a WHOLE RANGE of HTML/code funkiness on the web; Google should be smart enough to look past most of the oddities.
Looking forward to part #2.
enrico — September 28, 2008 @ 4:01 pm
Wow, that’s frustrating. If you can’t figure it out, let me know and I’ll ask my “expert team.”
Dr. Val — September 28, 2008 @ 10:15 pm
Beth,
Have you signed up for google analytics and google webmaster tools? If you haven’t I recommend you do. It should help. Send me an email if you have questions.
Jeff — September 29, 2008 @ 9:25 am
You also may want to look into the possibility of duplicate content from your own site.
Jeff — September 29, 2008 @ 10:24 am
Google is listening. In fact you have the ear of a Google Engineer (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/quick-comment-for-pixelrn/). What he says is your website has been hacked and your blog has suffered because of this.
Veign — October 4, 2008 @ 8:28 pm