How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
Over the last decade, my goal has been to not shoot an immediate “No” to things. “No” used to be my default. The things can be opportunities, they deserve to be evaluated. “No” is easy. Nothing changes, it’s conservative. “Yes”, however, is the sun breaking through the clouds. It can be hard. So, instead of saying “No”, I think about it, evaluate it, and try to make it work and to see its purpose. More often than not, it turns out that it makes sense.
Of course, this is a generalization that applies to my life. In case the thing is, “Let’s jump over the North Pole with a parachute”, still an immediate “No”. Okay, actually, can we make it work somehow? How are we getting there? How much does it cost? How do we travel to the North Pole and back? What about polar bears? Yolo.
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.
I pushed myself to blog more and the blog started getting likes. I really enjoy receiving these. I hit a bug of a kind, though. There is a way to violently like someone’s site. I’ve not figured out where it stands in the netiquette. Getting one or 5 likes feels great but getting 20 feels like an alien invasion.
What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?
An easy answer would be some individual problem, like health, loss, or work. The hard answer is – dealing with uncertainty without dwelling on the endless negative outcomes. I need my imagination to be helpful.
People have come to many ways to calm their fortune-telling never-ending internal narrator:
Meditation. Whatever the future, focus on the present. Life is simple in the now. Ignore the past.
Religion. If God will take care of all of us after all, why worry about the future? Study the very distant past.
Psychology. Whatever the future, nobody can take away your past.
Capitalism. Imagine this fantastic new car, don’t bother with the other things. Go shopping for dopamine highs.
News. Be afraid, be very afraid. We will use your internal narrator to make you come back and buy things.
Stephanie Plum is a young 30-ish old woman with no job and no future. She starts working as a headhunter and hunts for dangerous criminals who skipped bond, primarily relatives and beloved members of the community. She seems to be good at that. Dead bodies are flying everywhere for no clear reason.
There’s a saying that once a writer breaks through with a story, they’re expected to write the same story over and over until they die from old age. I sense a mild risk that Janet Evanovich does that. Book 2 is too close to Book 1 to deserve a separate review. It’s still enjoyable because Stephanie Plum is an enjoyable character and some of the supporting cast are also quite nice but it’s about hunting a guy named Kennie, and that summarizes it.
The names of each book in the series follow a naming convention of a number followed by some clickbait. Two Dough. Three Deadly. Four Whatever. Of course, Deadly is more interesting than Dough and without it, there would be no new post on the series. Ranked both with Five but objectively, Two is Four.
The villain in Three is Uncle Mo. Everyone loves Uncle Mo and will absolutely not assist the evil headhunter who tries to capture him. Uncle Mo is also the first male character that’s built with care. Why does everyone like Mo? Is he a fraud? I guess we’ll find out 🙂
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