News items

Google

22 Sep 2008

Earlier in the summer, I noticed that the number of hits on this site had fallen off to about two-thirds of the usual level. Some investigation showed that the reason was that, for no obvious cause, Google had stopped listing the site for searches for "Baedeker" - which, as you might imagine, is how most visitors find this site. I wrote to Google and asked them to reconsider and, in the latter part of August, the site was reinstated, without further comment. Then it disappeared again (I started monitoring this closely, as you might imagine) a week ago; I wrote again and now it's back (fourth position for searches for "baedeker" on google.co.uk).

There are two observations to be made: firstly that the indexing algorithms of Google are (deliberately) hard to understand, and anybody who says they can fix your website so that it always reaches high scores for certain searches (this is known as Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO) is almost certainly peddling snake oil; and secondly, isn't it amazing what a grip Google has over the success or otherwise of a website?

Other items...