Should I worry about Google

~ Veselin

The fellow WordPress.com blogger, Weirdo82, complains that Google hasn’t discovered their site yet. I decided to check what my own presence on Google is with the Google Search Console (WordPress.com’s support doc).

Google knows about my site but sends no traffic, based on ~2 days of data. Google’s knowledge of my site is limited to a very small number of indexed pages. Most posts aren’t there.

Why is that and should I care about it?

  • Google ranks sites based on an ever-changing algorithm. When Google started, the top factor for ranking was inbound links – if other sites link to you. This, however, has been abused by SEO experts from day one. People would buy countless assets, use them for linking and rank themselves high with some garbage content. So, Google pushed back by adding more and more factors and so far, the battle is ongoing. They are losing it in areas with a high commercial interest but no brands. Finding a human plumber in Bulgaria with Google is no go.
  • Blogs are by nature not great at coming up with unique searchable titles. When I blog about how pretty my cup of coffee was, should I realistically expect to be ranked? Probably not.
  • Blogs that are great with titles and topics that Google wants to see are generally unreadable by humans. I see the content written for bots all the time – 3-4 pages long so that it is considered quality content by the AI overlords. It would have multiple headers in the middle, each with a list from 1 to 10 or so. When I see that, I wish I had a block button to never see it again.

Google would send me 100s of hits per day to my former blog but all of these were to 10-year-old posts I didn’t care about. I value one comment on my latest post more than a 1000 of these Google clicks. So the answer is no – for a personal blog, Google doesn’t matter. Optimizing for their ever-changing algorithm would make my site worse.

I care about Google, what do I do

Google’s strategy is to make you pay for traffic, this is what made them so big. They farm people’s desire to be found, to sell products, and to grow. So, what else?

  • Bring blogrolls back – exchange links or quotations with people. Google doesn’t mention links as SERP factors anymore but they’re likely still using them
  • Write frequently – you never know which cringe post will be ranked and will boost your site by 100-200 views per day
  • Buy a domain early and register it for a long time
  • Get some social media shares, even if it’s just you sharing your own content. It likely counts.

I would keep acting like Google doesn’t exist for the context of this blog. It would be flattering to have more traffic but I still value human interactions (likes & comments) more than random traffic to old posts. These I get primarily from the Reader, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Published by Veselin

I ❤️ WordPress

15 thoughts on “Should I worry about Google”

    1. You’re welcome 🙂 I hope it helps. And if it doesn’t, Google is quite awful for bloggers anyway. They made the best reader and then shut it down, killing a major part of world’s blogging overnight.

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      1. That is really useful information. I’ve struggled before with my former blog that was personal to get views and readers. Only a handful of posts got me clicks from Google and that sucked 😂. I’d rather be popular within the WordPress community though and that is going great. Still a bit far from getting that dream goal of 100 unique readers per day but hopefully I’ll get there someday.

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      2. Yeah, perhaps when you get to 200-300 subscribers, that would just naturally happen. Facebook is not kind to posting blog posts at the moment, the auto-sharing is to a page. Twitter banned the auto-sharing. Building traffic sounds like a chore at the moment but is doable.

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      3. 😂 don’t I know it! I had like 70 followers on my old FB page. I was lucky if 5-10 people read and clicked a link and if I got even one like it was like Christmas all over again.

        If I even mention the word blog on Facebook I am sure the post is down voted because I rarely get likes if I talk about my blog. If I rant about anything else, I get lots – but my blog? It’s like the most boring subject in the world! 😝

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      4. I’ve noticed a similar thing, although I only have followers on Twitter (but I have 2700 of them).

        I’m not sure if people generally dislike seeing blog posts or these social media platforms do not share them because they want to be paid for traffic. It’s probably a combination of both. Not sure why I’d get 5 or 10 clicks and 0 likes out of 2700 followers. Haven’t cracked that nut yet.

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    1. Well, there are benefits to blog for fun. Some people blog for living, and they need traffic. They have to buy Facebook pages, post on obscure subreddits, publicize in every single social network on the planet and farm visitor by visitor until they become the new celebrity 🙂

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