Blog pains
Just had a long conversation with a good friend from NY. We talked about science, careers, how the locals back at Columbia University are faring ... and of course about blogs.
It's funny, back in grad school, we had many conversations about reaching out to the public and spreading the gospel of science (and no I'm not implying that science is like a religion). In a way, I guess that's what this blog is about. Although I have the suspicion that most of the readers are scientists themselves (or even biologists).
This inkling that no non-scientists ever come to my blog is compounded by the fact that I've been banished from Google.
It use to be that you could type in "daily transcript blog" and my site was hit #2, now it's something like hit #700. I used to get lots of traffic from Google from people who would perform searches on "blog mRNA" or "central dogma of biology", but no longer. Now my traffic from Google has gone to zero (although Google's blog search lists my entries just fine). So plain unsuspecting folk can only get to my site by searches in Yahoo and MSN (something also happened to my Technorati entry), or via direct links.
I've read up on why Google may ban your site, and I'm quite sure that this is indeed what happened. In fact listed in the top 10 as a hit in Google for "daily transcript blog" is another site "Daily Transcript Q&A". This was a site I accidentally set up when blogger told me that the ribonucleicacids URL was not available (which it wasn't). So I had registered this site without knowing it. Well instead of deleting this second site, I decided to add some info to it (hence the "Q&A").
Actually the VERY first URL I entered was "ribonucleicacid.blogspot.com". Again blogger told me that this URL was taken, but again it in fact registered this site under my user name. For a while this URL just sat there. Then one day I posted an entry directing traffic from that URL to this site "ribonucleicacids.blogspot.com" (singular vs. plural) - why not. Well I'll tell you why not ... this was probably the cause of the Google (and Technorati) ban. Creating websites to boost your links.
Oh well, who needs Google anyway?
(and yes I know, they own blogger)
It's funny, back in grad school, we had many conversations about reaching out to the public and spreading the gospel of science (and no I'm not implying that science is like a religion). In a way, I guess that's what this blog is about. Although I have the suspicion that most of the readers are scientists themselves (or even biologists).
This inkling that no non-scientists ever come to my blog is compounded by the fact that I've been banished from Google.
It use to be that you could type in "daily transcript blog" and my site was hit #2, now it's something like hit #700. I used to get lots of traffic from Google from people who would perform searches on "blog mRNA" or "central dogma of biology", but no longer. Now my traffic from Google has gone to zero (although Google's blog search lists my entries just fine). So plain unsuspecting folk can only get to my site by searches in Yahoo and MSN (something also happened to my Technorati entry), or via direct links.
I've read up on why Google may ban your site, and I'm quite sure that this is indeed what happened. In fact listed in the top 10 as a hit in Google for "daily transcript blog" is another site "Daily Transcript Q&A". This was a site I accidentally set up when blogger told me that the ribonucleicacids URL was not available (which it wasn't). So I had registered this site without knowing it. Well instead of deleting this second site, I decided to add some info to it (hence the "Q&A").
Actually the VERY first URL I entered was "ribonucleicacid.blogspot.com". Again blogger told me that this URL was taken, but again it in fact registered this site under my user name. For a while this URL just sat there. Then one day I posted an entry directing traffic from that URL to this site "ribonucleicacids.blogspot.com" (singular vs. plural) - why not. Well I'll tell you why not ... this was probably the cause of the Google (and Technorati) ban. Creating websites to boost your links.
Oh well, who needs Google anyway?
(and yes I know, they own blogger)
posted by apalazzo at 7:01 PM
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