Sunday 4 November 2012

An Existential Ennui Appeal: Give Us a Click

Quick(ish) update to the announcement the other week about Existential Ennui having moved from a ".blogspot.com" domain to a custom "www.existentialennui.com" domain: one consequence that I didn't foresee, and therefore didn't mention in that post, was that the migration of EE from one URL to another would end up having a massive, negative impact on the site's Google rankings. Heretofore, if you keyed in the search term "existential ennui", EE would be the top hit. Right now, however, that's no longer the case: as I type, EE is nowhere to be seen (other than, bizarrely, the mobile version of the blog; don't ask me what that's all about) in the results when you deploy that search term, and other phrases that used to produce results which led directly to EE – "Anthony Price", say, or "P. M. Hubbard", or "Sarah Gainham", and so forth – are no longer bringing up links to here.

To be honest I'm not actually sure what can be done about this; the old links no longer have the same URLs, so I guess it'll simply take a while for old posts to receive enough hits at their new URLs to show up in the rankings again. But rather than let matters lie and hope for the best, it strikes me one thing I could do – or rather, you could do, if you feel so inclined – is to click on the masthead at the top of the blog or on some of the posts in the Existential Ennui Archive in the right-hand column. Doesn't matter which ones: pick a few favourites, maybe, or better still ones you haven't read before, and go and click the living bejeezus out of them. I have no idea if that will help, but I suppose at the very least it couldn't hurt.

This isn't mere vanity on my part, by the way (well, not entirely): the purpose, or perhaps point, of Existential Ennui, as has become gradually clearer over the past few years (to me as much as to anyone), is to be a repository of hopefully entertaining, amusing and diverting information about relatively obscure books and their publishing histories, and if no one can find that information, then the whole enterprise becomes essentially redundant. So, if you wouldn't mind: go, click. Click on the masthead, click on the posts... hell, click on Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s: that one's always worth another look. And thank you in advance for your time.

7 comments:

  1. I've clicked away for a bit but isn't what you need other pages linking to EE?

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  2. Possibly; but there are still links coming in to EE from Wikipedia and elsewhere, and those are redirecting fine. It's sheer visibility that's needed, and that usually comes with clickage.

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  3. I had noticed the problem, but was preoccupied with other matters--I'll make a point of clicking it up at work in the coming days.

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  4. Thanks Chris. Together, we can return Existential Ennui to its rightful position as a randomly chanced upon, swiftly exited load of old nonsense.

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  5. faithful researcher21 November 2012 at 17:56

    Good news! When I asked google to search "existential ennui" yours was the second listed site.

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  6. Aha, excellent news! I've noticed that some of the individual links are moving up the rankings as well, and behind the scenes in my stats I can see search traffic is picking up as well. Heading in the right direction...

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  7. Still work to do on individual posts, folks, but on my browsers, EE itself is the top hit once again. Thank you for your clickage.

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