The power of robots
For days I’ve been convinced that I’d so offended my entire readership that all of you had stopped reading this blog. I was beginning to panic that I wouldn’t be able to redeem the situation and that this blog would die. Visitor numbers are well down (almost one third of normal) and I was a bit upset about this. Actually, it’s not as sinister as I’d first thought, but it is likely my fault.
About a week or so ago, I added a Robots.txt file to my server which I thought would be useful to help Google index my site. As it turns out, it had the opposite effect, and now only about half of my pages are indexed. Without delving too much into computer jargon, it means I f*cked up and am no longer getting traffic from Google. This is something I have to work at fixing if I ever want to have decent traffic or use Adsense again.
If the pages don’t start to get reindexed soon then I’ll have a real problem. I’m slapping myself as I write this.
If you want to increase your traffic I would strongly advise to make the most of social bookmark websites. Besides del.ico.us and Stumble, i suggest to add netvouz, netscape, mister wong, magnolia, blogmarks and lefthit.
The backlinks they generate are damned worth to rank well in Google in the long term. And in the short term they may boost your incoming traffic.
Hi Matt,
Your blog uses wordpress right? Remove everything from your robots.txt file and add thses lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Thats what I use on http://www.bangkokdiaries.com and it works great.