Blogging - A Roller Coaster Ride

This is a guest post from Kevin Tea.

Blogging can be a roller coaster of a ride, taking you from elated heights to depressed lows. You run the whole gamut of emotions from joy through frustration to despair - and that can be on a good day! The people who go into blogging expecting to make a quick fortune are rare and I think most are pragmatic enough to realise that it involves hard work and perseverance. That mindset that is ready to accept that blogging can be a slog even though the passion and drive remains, are rarely prepared for the downsides such as seeing months of hard work possibly wiped out due to situations outside of their control. Which is what happened to me.

I started my blog just over a year ago on the Wordpress.com service and seeing readership rise decided to make an honest blog of it, bought it its own domain name, invested in a premium theme, paid a professional designer to work up a header and generally tried to make it look as good as I could. Over the months I saw the readership rise, not a staggering amount but then I wasn't looking at this project as a retirement fund. In March this year the site recorded just over 3000 visitors for the month and over 9000 visits. Then disaster struck.

Disaster!

In April an attempt to remove some CSS code led to my site disappearing. I tried to work round how I could give it the kiss of life, have a laying on of hands and bringing it back from the dead but all to no avail. Casting aside the golden commandment that real men (a) don't read manuals and (b) don't ask for directions,  I got in touch with the company that hosted my site and we managed to resurrect it. Those two days, caused by my own pride, cost me dearly in that for some reason Google was now failing to index my site, I could see that search engine links were dropping and my Page Ranking of 3 looked to be threatened.

A double whammy occurred in early May when a plugin incompatibility again took my site offline and all I was looking at a white screen of death - it may be different from a blue screen of death but the gut churning symptoms are still the same - and I decided to act. I am fortunate that my host has an interactive chat facility and within five minutes I had fully explained what had happened and what the last actions I had performed and within another five minutes my site was up and running. OK, the company had deleted the plugins directory but this allowed me to go through and reinstall manually one by one until I hit the plugin that had caused the problem - it crashed the site again - and I removed it via FTP.

Falling Visitors

I'll be perfectly honest, I am not that techy a person and this was the sort of shit and aggravation I could do without! On top of this search engine access was dropping and my readership was continuing to fall too. In April that had dropped to 2800 - which was still higher than February's figures, and in May they dropped still further to 2500, again more than February but definitely going in the wrong direction.

Naked Hang-Gliding

If I couldn't reverse that readership drop, get the site indexing by Google sorted, then it appeared to me that all that hard work now was going to be wasted. I won't admit to being mildly depressed about this, I was more like freaking hacked off big time to the extent that I vowed that if the readership continued to drop and hit the pre-March levels I was going to fold the blog and take up something useful like naked hang-gliding, mud wrestling with rabid wolves or knitting!

So, instead of spending the latter part of May working on content I started to look at the Great Google Conundrum. The xml-sitemap plugin was working, generating a new sitemap every day, but it wasn't being indexed. Using Google's Webmaster Tools service I saw the site that was registered was http:// rather than http://www - maybe the search engine was getting confused by this schizophrenia?

I decided to re-validate the http:// site and create a new site for Google to validate at http://www  and  ensured that the sitemap and robots.txt files were correct on the server and then resubmitted both URLs for indexing.

The Solution

Remarkably Google successfully indexed the http://www version within hours. There were some trawl errors but I put this down to the fact that I had deleted most of the categories because the new version of Thesis could not handle large numbers ( I had around 60).  However, the http:// version did not index and had that big X against the sitemap and the compressed version. I decided then to delete both of these and rebuild and resubmit. It worked. Now I have both site alternatives being indexed and a quick test with an SEO plugin for Chrome shows that the sites are now being read properly. Encouragingly Google Analytics and Awstats show a significant rise in visitors in the three days following the successful re-indexing.

The Moral

Hopefully this means that I won't have to go mud wrestling with rabid wolves, but the moral of this story is that even when things look dark, if you keep going and have faith in what you are doing, you will succeed and the light at the end of the tunnel isn't an express train rushing towards you.

Kevin Tea blogs about web 2.0 and cloud computing, with a slant towards small and medium sized businesses at Web2andmore.net You can follow him on Twitter @kevincumbria

Not related (even remotely) but other really good stuff:

1/ Using current events to win more traffic

2/ Are you writing for your audience?

3/ How to get benefit from posts that are really popular on your blog