In some recent posts (1, 2, 3) I’ve mentioned my experiences trying to recover search-engine visibility after moving a blog from WordPress to Bitbucket.
Below are Google Analytics statistics for Bitbucket and WordPress statistics for the all-but-deleted WordPress blog. Pages served (Google: “pageviews”; WordPress: “impressions”) are down to roughly 30 a day where there were roughly 75 a day before.
WordPress statistics for WordPress blog
Google Analytics statistics for Bitbucket blog
Part of that, I’m sure, has to do with the active promotion of blogs by WordPress, both to other WordPress users and to search engines. But posts and topics that I consider the more interesting ones do seem to be getting attention in roughly the same proportion that they used to. (The most popular page since the move has been one presenting a quotation from Yuen Ren Chao, my tàilǎoshī 太老師; one topic that seems to have dropped out is my two posts on turmeric tisane or haldi chai, 1, 2.)
(As of today, Bing still serves a great many dead links to now-deleted WordPress posts. But I haven’t taken any steps to enable Bing analytics.)
Relatively little of my content appears in top ten hits on Google Search; that is nothing new. But it used to be that if I told people to search for kenkō branner, say — a very distinctive combination of search terms — they would find my post quoting Kenkō’s insightful comment about the state of mind of the kyūdō 弓道 student; no longer.
There are two more things I can do about this. I can encourage search engines to take a much deeper interest in my site by enabling advertising. That is something I don’t much want to do, although I recognize that web advertising is something I need to learn about. For Google Analytics Advertising Features, there is a single line to add to the Universal Analytics code:
ga('require', 'displayfeatures');
and then one must sign a new privacy policy. I’ve tentatively added the line of code, but I haven’t signed, and advertising remains off.
The other thing I can do is to start using tags and categories in my posts. I didn’t like the way those things were managed on WordPress, so I omitted them when I designed the Pelican theme I use for the present static blog. Instead, to each post I have appended a full list of all past posts. I am beginning to see that it would have been wiser to do the expected thing and include tags.
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