Changes to the Blog and One Thing Not Changing

While I really liked the minimalist theme in place since the beginning of the year, the free template was not very flexible and easily broken. So now I’m trying out this Blogger provided one since it is the closest in feel to it though even more minimalist in appearance. Also, I’ve enabled the Mobile option to see if it displays a little better on smartphones and tablets. Any feedback on that particular feature would be appreciated.

After doing some digging, I found I was not alone in seeing my traffic decline starting in December. Google has made some changes that have demoted a lot of sites in their search engine and it doesn’t look like they’ll be undoing them. That means I’ll never see the traffic I once had

One massive change by Google that is actually destroying livelihoods is a revamp of the image search that now shows the full size images on a website rather than preview images. So sites that would get traffic to sell images and photos now do not because they aren’t linked to as prominently. The theory going around is that this is a result of pressure from Pinterest and Facebook in the arena of searching for pictures.

I had noted that more and more traffic to websites was through image search rather than text search. This is the opposite of how I search which made it a surprise to me going through the logs. So this is a killer for people trying to make a living selling photos online. There will have to be a way to adapt without loosing search rankings for them, but no solution has really been found yet.

More info can be found here and specifically here. Needless to say that people are not happy about any of this.

In my case, it means fewer people will read the reviews I put up due to most searching being by images these days. Am I going to change things there?

Not likely. The reviews will continue for insomniacs around the world to peruse.

I’m very grateful I’m not counting on any money from the blog because it is getting close to impossible to make money from the Web if you are a small site not selling goods or services.

There has been a setback on a project that was going to be linked to From the Sidelines, but I hope to still get it up and running before February runs out of days. A theoretical goal of the 14th looks unlikely so it will get done when it gets done.