The changes to the URLs have affected my site… google has officially dropped me from the rankings. This time last week I was receiving an average of 500 hits to the site, usually more. The last couple of days have seen about 100 (each). My web stats graph is terrible. Basically googles caches of my site have disappeared, meaning that it needs to completely reindex my site with the new URLs; in effect, it’s like making a site from scratch, as if there is no content here at all.

There were some major issues (if you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll have seen me figuratively pulling my hair out), most of which can be resolved by me biting my tongue and rebuilding the google rank (there goes that = there goes 2 years of building a good ranking), but one I’m still working on which is getting the homepage redirect to work without somehow causing a conniption for google’s robots.

At this point I am at a loss to resolve it, as this goes entirely over my head with coding. It may be that I need to pull all my files down and relocate them just to get everything to work the way it’s supposed to.

Frankly I’m rather upset right now, and whilst I will keep posting (perhaps upping the number of posts over the next few weeks to help get google rankings back in order) I am so entrenched in being annoyed with this whole thing, don’t expect any great big tutorials. I’ve quite literally wasted a whole day with this already and am nowhere near close to solving it and am losing my patience with running the site in the first place. 

In the meantime, I would like to ask those of you who are linking to my site to update their links: if you click on whatever page/blog post you are linking to, it will send you to the correct URL; copy and paste to your site. That will also help get google back on track. (I would love to also ask you to click on my site whenever it comes up in google searches if you see it, but that would be against google’s rules)

At this point, geez, I wish I had enough money to pay someone to do all this crap for me. I really do prefer sitting at my work desk making puppets than spending a day figuring out one line of code. Seriously, I don’t get how people do this for a living without going mad.

And now I’m off to rest my poor brain…