Welcome to the September 2012 Monthly Roundup post. I take some time at the beginning of each month to give a brief recap on what’s happened last month. I use these as a way for new visitors to get up to speed on what’s going on and as a way to set goals for myself in the coming months.
This month delivered me two huge whammies and a loss that had me questioning whether I should bother continuing to blog, but we’ll get to that later.
So, let’s get started…
September 2012
You’ll notice that most of the blogs this month did not follow the usual format. The first post this month I wrote for a contest on smartpassiveincome.com. It actually was a great opportunity for me to share a personal story and relate it to the topic of this blog – taking a day trip.
If you follow that link you’ll see that there are 4 $100 Amazon gift card prizes that will be randomly selected and 1 $100 Amazon gift card that will be awarded to the best write up. I didn’t participate with the sole goal of winning the gift card however, I did it for the opportunity to try a different style of blog entry and for the exposure (after the contest, he will be linking out to all the entries). Wish me luck!
My sister’s father-in-law passed after a year long struggle with Leukemia. My sister and her husband were completely torn up. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself – I mostly wanted to help my sister and brother-in-law but wasn’t sure how. So I wrote about it, I wrote about my thoughts and feelings on the matter what I did to help. This helped me get my head in order and will hopefully help someone else in a similar situation.
The rest of the blog posts were informational and event based articles. You can see all of September’s posts here or in the archive on the left.
The Double Whammy
About a week ago, GoDaddy decided to put all the websites that are hosted on the same server as this site under protection. They implemented 302 redirects on all pages of my site. Apparently one of the sites on my server experienced a substantial amount of volume and in order to protect all the sites, they implemented a server-wide 302 redirect. This is what they told me when I contacted customer support.
Now this normally wouldn’t be an issue – anyone who visited this site through a browser could see and use the site – however, Google and other search engines were having difficulty crawling the pages of my site. Almost all the pages would fail and my site was devalued by Google and knocked down significantly in the rankings on its search engine results.
On top of this, Google also rolled out a new algorithm update which seemed to be affecting how a lot of sites were ranking. Because these two issues happened at the same time, I’m not sure how much my site was affected specifically by the algorithm update. Between the two, however, my traffic was significantly affected. I am going to skip on the traffic report for this month since there won’t be enough data to analyze.
The Fallout
To see all that traffic just be stripped away overnight was a punch in the gut. I spent hours and hours of work taking pictures, posting write ups and working on site design; it was hard watching it all unravel. I sulked for a few days and wondered what I should do. I thought about giving up; there are a lot of big, established websites in this niche. Ultimately I decided that I want to keep going. I need to keep trying in the hopes that it will pay off.
“You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.” – Maya Angelou
Coming Up
I swear I’m going to post the content I promised last month. I do have more activities in Abington, MA and Jamestown, RI. My Jamestown day trip was awesome, I had so much fun and I can’t wait to share it with you.
I’m hosting a Chili Showdown this weekend and I plan on doing a write up about that. Speaking of which, I need to go clean my house and start preparing for it!
Cheers!
-Craig
Leave a Reply