It sure has been a month. I’ve been wanting to write but just couldn’t. I also never explained why I stopped doing daily posts. So, I’m just going to explain what’s been happening and why.
First, why did I stop with my daily posts? Well, my overall web traffic dropped, A LOT, when I was doing daily posts. I was getting less than 10% of my normal hits per article, including major ones, while I was writing daily. At first I thought it was because I had left Twitter and Twitter was one of the major drivers of traffic. While I was debating rejoining Twitter I got injured, pretty badly. This forced me to not write for a bit. I noticed when I stopped updating my site traffic went up, by a fair amount. Like within 3 days of not updating traffic boosted. I then went back to writing and tried to write semi-regularly. I think at this time I did 3 posts within a week of each other. Again traffic declined. So, I took a break to just heal up. Traffic boosts again. This was very confusing and I decided to press on like nothing had happened and I would go back to my twice a month schedule. All of my traffic levels returned to normal. This answered my question of if Twitter was important to my site, turns out it wasn’t. What was it?
I decided to go digging into my back end, something I rarely do. I found out Google wasn’t indexing my site while I was doing regular updates. The Google bots would sometimes check out the site but wouldn’t index it. Bing was randomly indexing, as was Baidu. Yandex was indexing every post I made, so good job Yandex. DuckDuckGo, Brave, Yahoo, and all of those other “we’re like Google but no tracking” search engines were indexing me just like Google was. It was weird and I am not accusing them of pulling a mid 00s Bing by copying Google’s indexing, but it does seem fishy. Especially for search engines that claim they wish to put an end to Google’s monopoly of the internet. By doing this little test I have found Bing, Yandex, and Baidu to be the most reliable, in terms of indexing the internet, search engines. Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and all of the other anti-Google ones are horribly unreliable for smaller sites. Which is stupid because those engines need to compete against Google by propping up smaller sites. This is something a lot of small website admins have told me. They will never pop up via Google but will via Bing. When I test with Yandex and Baidu they also pop up, even if their websites are banned in Russia or China.
To sum this bit up: this means Google and most other search engines are punishing smaller sites for posting more content. This actively stops smaller sites from growing because if people don’t have a reason to check your website regularly it will fade from memory. Look at what happened to titans like VG Cats, 8bit Theater, Snafu, Homestar Runner, and Something Awful. I actually had a hard time remembering websites I used to frequent because so many, like Kill Frog and Joe Cartoon (these two weren’t even close to titans), all lost their rising popularity because they stopped updating. This is why sites like Tapas have taken over the web comic world. You now have one website hosting every web comic. If you don’t update for a bit then others on the site will keep your users there. Every section of the internet has been gobbled up by either social media or a NewGrounds equivalent for whatever niche there is. This is causing issues with censorship, looking at you NexusMod and ModDB. Back when modders had their own websites we never had an issue with censorship of mods, especially ones that just enabled content from other regions (that’s all the Spiderman mod did. Set it to the Arabic version while keeping the language in English). Of course you’re probably thinking, “Well, all that matters is updating. So screw Google!” That’s not true. Until people recognize your site and become fans of whatever it is you do all traffic comes from search engines. So, while people could enjoy what I write if they haven’t taken the time to memorize my website then they will exclusively come from however they found me before, usually via search engines.
Of course it isn’t so cut and dry. If your website’s SEO ranks and/or Alexa ranking are high enough then Google won’t punish you for updating frequently. The issue is getting your rankings higher. A lot of search engines will boost your ranking if your website is linked to from other websites, excluding social media now. Every site I link to on my blog gets a small boost. However, they often do not link back to me. I do not ask them to, but it does suck. The way to exploit this is to create lots of websites that spam articles about your website linking to it. Google will index them periodically but as long as you remember to write something once or twice a month you should be fine. You just need to manage multiple websites until your main website picks up. Another weird thing is using WordPress. WordPress, the backbone to most websites now, can get your website skipped from indexing. If WordPress includes specific meta tags, or info, Google will skip your site. One of those is the term “blog”. Yes, if WordPress includes the word blog in any of the meta tags Google is more likely to skip your website, especially if you don’t have enough regular hits. Whenever Alphabet sold their blogging platform they added a blog skip to Google. If your WordPress theme has specific issues Google will also skip it. Same if it detects broken plugins. Admins make sure your WordPress isn’t fucking over if you appear in search engines. With all that out, let’s go over what happened in October.
In October I got really sick. I was unable to breathe regularly for about 2 weeks. What happened was my wife and I went to another city as a minivacation. Before this minivacation I was mostly fine, just working on improving some health issues popping up and doing some programming and making new lesson plans. That’s pretty much October. I’m still a bit messed up from when I was sick, sometimes my lungs hurt a significant amount. So back to healing I go in between everything else.
What am I programming? Well, remember when I mentioned prior how WordPress could fuck over your site with some search engines? Yeah, I am working on making some changes to the back end of my site to prevent that. I’m also working on extending the site beyond just being a blog. I’m not going to give any details, just saying that I am working on something. I’ve not programmed in PHP since I was in high school, gotta relearn everything. While we’re at it I’ve not coded a single line of C++ since I was in college outside of a “hello world” program. I wrote that to test out the IDE I bought for my tablet. I also never properly learned JavaScript, shocker because I was a front end dev in high school. See, when I was in high school the term DHTML was a thing. It was a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and VB. It was meant to be a generic term so the dynamic languages of the internet could change over time. For instance DHTML2 could’ve been Cold Fusion, HTML, CSS, and ASP. When I was prepping to go to college there were talks of replacing JavaScript. Microsoft, FireFox, Opera, and Chrome were all debating ending JavaScript support but no one did. We’re still stuck with JavaScript. A language programmers have hated since I can remember. I remember people shitting on JavaScript in AOL and Yahoo! chatrooms. IRC channels were dedicated to the hatred of JavaScript. I’ve accepted we’re stuck with JavaScript forever because no one can agree on what new language should be the standard. Although Google could force it at anypoint since a majority of web browsers are Chromium these days. Only FireFox would be fucked over. I really don’t want to learn JavaScript but I have to.
To say it was exclusively the illness that stopped me from writing in October would be a lie. I was having problems deciding what to write. Sometimes I get this weird…. posting shyness. Like, if I don’t post I need to come back with something good. I was trying to work through this but every time I did write I would abandon it for a new topic pretty fast. I’ve a few unfinished ideas mocking me. Unsure if I will finish some of this.
Another issue with deciding what to write is what’s okay to write. There’s a few things I want to write about, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. I have seen people talk about some of these subjects on their own sites and still get butt fucked with issues. From hosting being taken down, especially to people on shared hosters, to lawsuits. What type of stuff? Well, writing about a certain activist who had a, using their own words, “consent accident” (see rape) and how this individual is trying to censor the internet as a whole so people do not bring up their “consent accident”. This is something I stumbled upon and despite their best efforts to conceal this it is still pretty easy to find all of the evidence. Including the evidence of them trying to take down sites for exposing them over their “consent accident”.
Next there’s this really important figure who got their master’s degree before their bachelor’s degree. This is impossible, and a major red flag some fuckery has happened. If you don’t know how getting a master’s works, let me tell you. You have to have a bachelor’s degree to get your master’s. If you do not have a bachelor’s degree and you complete a master’s program you get a certificate of equivalency. If you finish your bachelor’s after you get this certificate of equivalency they do not upgrade your certificate to a master’s. You must finish the master’s program again to get your new master’s degree. It also isn’t back dated. Talking about this, and posting the proof, gets a lot of unwanted attention pointed directly at you. It’s really interesting to see how corrupt the tech/business industry is when you look at these two people. When you speak about them you get to experience the full wrath of this corruption.
I’ve been going down some weird rabbit holes, man. Like, when I am calling a college to see when someone graduated to confirm their degrees you know shit’s getting weird. There’s also a story about John Romero fucking over the people who supported him, and how the publisher is doing nothing to help. I’ve reached out to both parties for comment but neither has returned an email. I’ve been debating writing about Tommy Tallarico, a defense piece at that. No, I don’t think he’s a good guy or anything but I have been seeing people take random posts as facts and when I watched the Ooof video again I noticed a lot of things HBomberGuy either missed/overlooked to make Tommy look worse than he is. These last two won’t get me in trouble like the two before, well the Romero post might, but it’s still hard to get everything lined up and written. These are posts that could easily get me sued and would win me no one’s favor in the process. Like I get it, Tommy Tallarico sucks but you guys don’t need to lie about him or take every bit of impossible to confirm evidence as fact. Just accept he’s a piece of shit and laugh at him, no need to be a Tommy Tallarico when talking about Tommy Tallarico.
I guess that wraps it up. Google was punishing me for updating regularly, something they do to every small site. I was having poster’s anxiety. I was afraid of being sued, or worse, over some of the things I wanted to write about (when you see what my next post is you’re going to be shocked that it got the stamp of approval). Finally I am trying to improve some skills I’ve long since neglected. I’m unsure if there’s a lot on my plate or if it seems like a lot. I just know what’s on my plate is really weird, possibly the plate itself too. Take care. Be healthy. Stay kind to one another. Finally, don’t count on me coming back to Twitter. Unlike some of y’all who bitched and moaned about Elon Musk making the site worse I just ducked out. No need to give him the web traffic to help him find investors and advertisers.