The Google September Update Killed My Author Blog

 

For a little over a year now, I have been trying to fine-tune my blog.  It isn’t the fanciest thing in the world and will never win an award, but I wanted a spot for my book information and to talk about my experiences as a new, self-published author.   Goodreads would have been nice, but they don’t offer a blog.  And Amazon provides a nice author space, but again, no where for a blog; only a blog feed.  So, I turned to Blogger.

I have toyed with Blogger before.  In fact, many years ago I had a blog called “Read It Again Mom” where I reviewed picture books and posted craft ideas for the toddler/preschool age group.  Pictures were pinned a lot in Pinterest and the blog received a good number of visits per day.   Life because a bit chaotic though and I decided to let the blog go.  Now I had to start again!

Remnants of my previous blog still hung out under my username, so I had to do some cleaning, but things fell together rather nicely once I wrote my first post.  Again, nothing earth-shattering, but I was expressing my feelings and ideas, sharing new books and new experiences and over the course of the last year, I grew to receiving 100-200+ visits to the blog per day.  I was so thankful!

THEN Google rolls out its “helpful content” update.

This update was supposed to target content written with algorithms in mind to rank well – not necessarily content written by people for people.   Well, I can tell you, I haven’t a clue how to write content that will rank well in Google yet I was hit hard.  My pages can no longer be found in Google at all and I am seeing very few visits per day, probably as a result of links in Pinterest and Instagram or on my Link Tree account. 

I really do not know what to do.  Right now, I plan to keep putting out my posts filled with ramblings about my struggling author days.    

On the plus side, this whole debacle has caused me to try the Microsoft Edge browser because they have actually indexed my blog!