I started Blog About Crafts in 2006. When looking for a name, I thought Blog About Crafts fit perfectly with what I had planned for this site. The site grew and thanks to a pair of controversial posts hitting the front page of Digg.com, things were moving along fairly well. Until the hacking incident. I was down for around 2 months. Google and to a lesser extent the other search engines, slammed me and slammed me hard. They discounted many of my back links and things that I ranked well for seemed to be treated as if they were suddenly written in secret code that couldn’t be interpreted by the search engines anymore.
It’s been several years since then.
I tried regular posts with lots of outgoing links. I did a bit of guest posting (before the latest edict that says they are now evil). I Pinned, I emailed and I commented on other blogs. Very little changed. And, many of the people I thought I was helping acted indifferent to my showcasing them and their works. Those who supported my efforts and for whom I was able to drive new business to almost made it worthwhile but unfortunately the time vs payback just wasn’t there.
This site gets few visitors. If I add something that I think is appropriate, I might get a small handful of extra visitors but generally I’m ignored. If I revamp the entire site to better match “Good SEO practices” as defined by the latest edicts out of California, there might be a small, little jump but it goes away in less time than it took me to pick out a new theme/design for the site. Google sends a bit of traffic here and there but generally it’s a ghost town. I could write more often but what I felt like talking about wasn’t always “art and crafts.” Couldn’t dare do that, it would hurt my rankings on Google and the other search engines. Well, darn, I’ve done just about everything I’m supposed to do to keep the search engines happy and they still seem to be penalizing me for being down for two months.
Whatever, I Quit.
No, I’m not going to discontinue this site. I’m just going to quit worrying about what Google, Yahoo!, Bing or any of the others might think about this site. If I want to talk about crafting today, WordPress tomorrow and how much I hate beets the next day; that’s what I’m going to do. Maybe some folks will come and visit along the way and perhaps I’ll just be talking to myself. But, whatever, I give up. This is going to be my blog going forward and I don’t give a darn about staying on topic, keyword optimization, back links or any of that other SEO crap.
Furthermore, I don’t really want to be bothered looking for a photo to go with this rant. That will mess up this site a bit, but that’s just too darn bad. Don’t like reading a post without a photo…go away. If you are mad at me now because you think beets are the best thing God put on this wonderful Earth of ours…please just go away too.
The rest of you are warmly invited to join me on this journey. Who knows, maybe that will be the next Google edict…sites that talk about random crazy, mixed-up stuff are more natural because they are obviously not trying to gain search engine positions. And maybe, Blog About Crafts will gain the number one ranking for “gal who quit worrying about SEO and just decided to write about what she was thinking about that day without worrying if anyone was listening.”