New Media

I’ve watched my blog’s traffic dwindle the past few weeks from an impressive steady stream to a pitiful trickle, even as my direct traffic from my RSS feed syndication on other websites has kept increasing as I’ve added fresh content. Comments became a rare event.

It’s been frustrating. On a hunch today, I pasted some text from some recent posts into a Google search bar only to be rewarded with no love. I was invisible to Google.

My blog was dying.

Finally figured out the problem this evening: Wordpress privacy settings.

Ever since I fixed my blog’s design issue a few weeks back, the setting has been on “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”. Ouch.

This sucks. My traffic has taken a hit, just as I got some pretty decent attention from the mainstream media (not sure when CNN is going to come calling again) and it’s going to be a hassle to get it back.

Let this be a cautionary tale to other Wordpress users: check your privacy settings and make sure you’re not hiding yourself from the search engines.

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