Or the Rise and Fall of If You Write It.
My random thoughts blog about trendy things has lost its small amount of Pagerank, which was 3 until fairly recently, and is now 0. This is not a great tragedy, except for my small trickle of income from paid posts that wanted a blog with a Pagerank of at least 3. Of course, it is entirely possible that writing paid posts is what cost me the Pagerank in the first place. Kind of funny that.
Alexa has also lost interest in If You Write It, my high spot on Alexa, so far as I recall, was about 165,000-which is where it is at the moment. But the current stats show my blog dropping down to the 600,000s or so, which is about as low as my current stats have been for a very long time. It is possible I could write some whiz bang post and hit the front page of Digg or FARK and get the numbers back up where I want them to be, but it is extremely unlikely.
So what has happened to bring about this reversal of fortune for If You Write It? Well, as with all things, it is my own fault. I have been dividing my attention with a couple of new blogs and I really do only have so much creativity to go around. But really, I feel my writing is about the same as always. Maybe I could write better content, but I am not at all sure about that.
A number of events over the past year or so that have effected my Pagerank, Alexa score, and general traffic numbers. Two items which generated traffic and no longer generate traffic are Micheal Vick and the sci fi film Cloverfield. I wrote regular posts of these two topics, but I have not found anything to replace them on a regular basis. Could the absence of these two topics be the reason for my dropping numbers? Maybe.
Among the posts that continue to generate hits are posts about Team Name Generators, Vanessa Anne Hudgens, Post Secrets, and Altered States of Consciousness. I have surprisingly little else to say about these popular topics on If You Write It.
I recently made some cosmetic changes to If You Write It, changing the blog template and getting rid of Haloscan-and all the comments of the past year or so. Not that I had that many comments, If You Write It has never been a huge comment magnet. If I deleted your comments, sorry, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
These changes were made after the fall from grace with Google and Alexa anyway. So what does any of this mean anyway? Changing my comments got rid of a horde of numskulls that liked to comment on the post about Vanessa Anne Hudgens. My recent post about Brad’s Deals and online coupons got a lot of hits. The vast bulk of my traffic still comes from Google, pagerank or no. I still find Google Trends a great way to get eyes on my blog.
These are just ways of keeping score, and my blog seems to be losing where it once seemed to be winning. But really, I am not so sure my Pagerank and Alexa rank matter. Except to my ego, of course.
PS-in the time it took me to write this post my Google Pagerank seems to have moved back up a bit and now is Pagerank 2.
