Blog Relations

This isn’t just another moan about Google, it might serve as a useful SEO tip. Unless you are ultra-trusted by Google – i.e. a .gov .edu or a BBC or listed in the hand-picked Google Directory or of similar stature – be very wary of making big changes to your site.

After many months of being consigned to the Google dustbin, our Storynory podcast started to turn up well on searches about a month ago. For instance, we were often number one search for “audio free kids” and so forth. New visitors to our site started to grow steadily. This only seemed fair, as lots of people were linking to us, including some quite big sites.

I noticed from the web hosting log that some people coming in on relevant searches were sticking around for “0″ seconds. I concluded that the pages weren’t loading fast enough for them to actually hit the page after clicking. I also felt that not many people scroll down our Storynory pages, but hunt for audio stories instead in the archive. So I dropped the number of entries per page from 8 to 4. The pages across the site were much shorter and loaded up much more quickly. But a few days later Google put us back in the dustbin.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to see the sites that link to us come up in searches, but own site all but invisible. Even blogs that don’t normally have much to do with kids audio came up but not us. So I gave in. I restored the number of entries per page back to 8, and now we seem to be allowed back into Google’s land of the living again.

Why did this happen? My only guess is that if you make a change that radically alters the number of times a key word appears on your pages, then Google gets suspicious. It thinks you were pretending to be clean, only to reinvent yourself as a spam site. Most of the entries on Storynory mention words like “audio” “story” “Kids” “children” – though free does not come up much. By halving the number of entries per page, I also halved the number of times those words appear.

It pisses me off that we can’t make useful changes to our own site without being kicked in the Googlies, but is my SEO tip for moody, temperamental Google: Don’t go making changes.