I don’t know what happened. Maybe I didn’t take our relationship seriously. Perhaps I got found out for fooling around with Bing and submitting my website on the sly to Yahoo? Whatever it is, Google has fallen out of love with me and my site. Since 6 June 2011, I’ve noticed a dramatic decrease in traffic from Google to my site. And when I say dramatic, I mean it is like a tap has been turned off. Without making it through a complete month of stats, I would say that it is looking like that I’ve lost about 80% of my casual traffic from Google.

It certainly is a sobering time and while I just run this place for my own amusement, if Google has this much power over my site and for whatever reason decides that my pages are no longer relevant, it makes it pretty pointless in doing anything. That’s how powerful Google has become. I never realised it before this moment, but unless you have a good ranking on Google (and previously I did, obviously) then you are going to hurtle into traffic obscurity pretty darn quickly. Though I do remember a similar thing happening to me back in 2004, but eventually the traffic returned of its own volition.

I’ve updated my sitemaps, emailed the Google people and asked for a reassessment and now I am just sitting here wondering what the heck I can do to get that traffic back on the site.

The weird thing is that is hasn’t stopped the amount of data being downloaded from the site which is still averaging around 20Gb of my music and video files. The more I look at the World Wide Web, the more I realise I know less and less about how it works.

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