... Nobody knows the troubles I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow.
Beautiful voice.
But it's true. The last few months have been - the last few years have been - a bit troublesome. And the last few months have been a particular hassle for my blogging activities and for my project activities. I've been missing out on organic search results for months, possibly longer. And that's affected my ability to tackle projects, too.
So - Organic Search Results.
As some of you know I've had TEdALOG Lite II blog since 2007 - and it was a continuation of a blog I'd been operating with Notepad and HTML, then some clever program that let me compose and edit on my PC and then uploaded a new set of pages to replace the indexes and add new pages, and finally I hit on Blogger.com - which you as readers experience as Blogspot.com - and which was a Google property when I started. My reasoning was Google Blogs should work with Google Search Engine should work with Google Anything Else. Right?
Well, sort of. For a while there wasn't any easy way to check stuff so I used Statcounter to keep my page hits statistics for me. Then there was this thing called Feedburner that let me "burn" my blog posts to an RSS feed that people could put into their newsreader software to see all my latest posts - and I still have RSS feeds for all those blogs and a list of them at Ted's News Stand if anyone wants the ultimate in post reading convenience. The Google bought Feedburner. For some reason it got harder to work with the feeds. And now it's practically useless.
And then Google Ads came along - I put "spots" in my blogs to fit one of dozens of precisely defined formats, Google served their ads into those spots, if anyone clicked or in some cases just visited the page with the ad in it, I'd get a micropayment in my account. I was on my way to millions!
Only... They'd collect my millions for me but would never pay them to me - because I was in Australia and they didn't pay here. And then they required me to have a business account and send them proof of identity, TFN, all the hooey. I couldn't even use the income on Google Play to pay subscriptions to apps. It would have been maddening.
Except... After several years, and adding two more blogs and installing Google Ads into them too, my balance was about $23. And Google wouldn't pay out until the end of the month, and only if the amount was $50 or more, and anway still not to Australia you uncouth little antipodean oik. Are you sensing any frustration yet? I had frustration. Oh yes.
But I've sort of digressed. Statcounter began to limit the free features set and Google came out with Google Analytics, they allowed Aussies to cop a fair suck of the saveloy and have money paid into Aussie bank accounts, the verification process got more convenient and attainable, and so I set up Analytics on those blogs and there seemed to be a bit of friction between GA tagging stuff and Blogger blogs and it didn't always quite work for me oh and the formats of Google Ads changed a bit and - oh yeah - my balance was still under the magic $50 by a fair way and then the limit changed to $100 anyway and do you know I still haven't had a payout yet?
Also Analytics was not playing ball all the time and the famous Google DILLIGAF attitude of no support is the best form of support meant I was trying to work out a lot of different suites of stuff to keep things going.
Long story short - at some point I made DuckDuckGo my default search engine. Because I wasn't happy with their privacy management. Bt this was one of the frustrations.
And I also deactivated Google Ads and Google Analytics because Ads made my pages look like shit on a shingle with touches of Piet Mondrian and Pro Hart and if readers clicked away to a link they'd cop a page in between that you had to close and it was the biggest POS ever.
Analytics kept throwing errors that I had to look up and then try to "fix" according to vague and odd snippets of BS and so one day I stopped fixing any of the errors and guess what? If you waited a few days then Analytics suddenly realised it had apparently made a cock-up because the errors went away and were never mentioned again without me having to raise a finger. WTFSM Google, WTFSM?
Then one day recently I was actually using Google Search Engine to find a particular term on one of my posts on one of my blogs and it didn't find it. I tried DuckDuckGo and it did. Somehow in all the wholesale deactivating Google products that weren't working with the one Google product I actually found useful, the search engine stopped actually searching and serving my pages. So for FSM knows how long, I've not had a single referral from anyone doing a search any of the stuff that's in my blogs. I know DDG is becoming more popular but GSE is still the only game in town for search hits and I'm not getting them.
Go to DDG, I have almost all my blog posts listed. Go to Bing, there they are. Go to Google, zip. It is ALL the blogs hosted on Blogspot so it's not a case of being delisted for using the "F" word too often. It's pretty obviously something I did while deactivating all the Google fruit but - geez... I have NFI what.
But if anyone knows what else to check and rectify, I'm all ears. Contact me. Please. I'm getting too old for this shit.
But That's Not All
I got the steak knives too... See, because I wasn't getting organic (read "served by Google or Bing but of course almost always Google and you don't have that Ted ha ha ha for reasons ha ha ha but we aren't going to tell you what they are Ted ha ha ha") hits to my pages I'm minus about 70-80% of traffic. And even though I don't serve ads now (unless I want to put them in, and please contact me if you want me to do that) I did have a few links to donate in a text footer and of course people wereren't seeing those.
So I did research and figured out how I can have one banner with multiple active zones so people could donate or subscribe to the newsletter. I felt too needy and beggy constantly adding a paragraph of "please subscribe and/or donate" messaging to the bottom of each post, I mean WTFSM? I could always do with help with the costs involved with everything I'm doing with the blogs and projects but there had to be another way and I decided a single banner image would be better.
You know how reactive websites work? If you're on a mobile phone you get served a format that fits the screen, if you're on a tablet you get another format and if you're on a laptop or PC you get another format.
I'm old school and use my laptop for most of what I do. (Okay I'll be honest - I'm past the point where people still have 20/20 vision and also have other issues that make reading a tiny screen difficult and swiping a little soft keyboard on-screen almost impossible.) So I preview a post, it's good - I schedule it.
I also know that most of my visitors use their mobile phone to consume the content. And just for a lark I opened a page on my trusty Samsung.
The flippin' banner doesn't appear on mobile sites!
Blogger promises to make the site reactive if I check this box here and add this set of links there in the blog settings page and I'd done that for the lot way back when I realised some people would be reading them on their phones. But IT DOESN'T WORK. Apparently.
So I kept the banner - which I quite liked because I created the artwork in it and scaled it and worked out how to image-map it and then use my hosted server to allow me to use one banner on multiple blogs and only have to change things in one place rather than seven.
But I had to also make a smaller image-map banner and then insert that into the body of the blog posts so that mobile phone readers could see them and (hopefully) feel moved to donate occasionally.
I make no bones about it - it costs me hundreds a year to keep the domain names registered, the hosted server paid up, subscriptions to the news services I read to get news and story ideas and research, and the materials for various projects I do and then make all the info available online here for free. And currently I am getting exactly nothing because no-one sees the damn pages, and then when people do, 80% of you still didn't see the banner so had no way to.
So anyhow - I made the little banner, served it from my hosted server, and - Blogger crapped itself. "You can't put an imagemap in the body! I don't know all those tags! I'm going to add a shitload more tags to try and fix it, fuck it up even more, and then spew up every time you want to edit or update this article!"
I'm going to add here that if I add an image from yet another Google property, Google Photos, Blogger also routinely shits its pants and then the image often disappears. It's still there in the HTML but obscured and hidden by Blogger's crappy HTML handling. Why it does that sort of thing is a mystery to me but then look at Blogspot blogs anyway - they are butt-ugly and klunky af and if it weren't for the fact that Blogger is FREE I'd have found a way to transfer them all to WP and host them somewhere else.
I had to do the same thing as I do for the header banner - kludge up an iframe and put that in the HTML and finally, that works:
(Oh and that little inline frame works in Blogger, in WP, and in any web pages I want it to. I basically McGyvered myself a tiny CDN for my blogs... )
I mean - this has been a several-months-long battle where everything was not only rigged and stacked against me and I had and still have no way to work out what's going on. I wasn't even aware that anything had been wrong, I've lost the little bit of support I'd had, and I'm still not sure what I'll do about it but if I can get some supporters back I might just upgrade my hosted server and stick multiple WP installations on it and then figure out how I can redirect all my Blogger properties to there. But I know one thing for sure and that is that in my current state I can't manage the extra expenses.
Late Edit: Substack
Substack, I just listened to the top cocky of the company being an arsehole in a video interview and figured they needn't be making any more income off my posts. Sorry - this was so crap when I watched it that I may have blocked it. Just got asked about it on Mastodon though so I though I should explain it.
Summary:
I know my page hits count has decreased dramatically, but I don't know by how much or when because Statcounter have been totally unhelpful in recovering a possibly hacked account a few months ago and so I've had to create a new account which doesn't have the history the old one had. I do know that I've been seeing a tiny percentage of what I was used to though - I keep saying I lost 70-80% because I'm being conservative but I can tell you the figure is far worse. Since I can't fix that on Google and can't ask everyone on the planet to use any other search engine than Google, nor afford to move all my blogs to a different platform, I'm stuck with it for now.
If you can help, that'd be great. If you know things I can check on Google to figure out where my organic search traffic has gone to, that would help. If you can spare the price of a coffee, hit the Ko-Fi mug above or the Paypal link. If you want to know what I post, the newspaper is a link to my current list of posts, and that page also has a link to subscribe to the only-once-a-week newsletter.
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