Site Changes ·

2/11/2021 ~ For years I had one site covering five topics: vitamin B12 health, legal issues, solar/off-grid, gardening, and looking-good. Now I have five sites, one for each topic.

When lack of mobile compatibility made Google drop my site from its search results I recreated my site to show up properly on tablets, mobile devices, and desktop computers. To do that I used a “responsive” WordPress theme and moved to hosting that didn’t charge per site.

Then, Google created the AMP project, amplifying speed for mobile users. Pages loaded lightening fast, and to alert people in search results, google put a little yellow lightening bolt next to AMP pages.

By some stroke of luck I was invited into Google’s study group on AMP, so I got to use their nifty program to translate my site into AMP.

When the study ended I began using a popular WordPress plugin to make my pages AMP fast. But, I began to notice that the pages weren’t really loading that fast, and I wasn’t getting the little lightening bolt.

The plugin developers soon provided a caching system that one paid for, whereas the regular plugin was free. I paid for it and indeed my pages loaded in milliseconds.

I was so happy about the speed I completely forgot to check if I was now getting the little yellow lightening bolt in search. (I almost solely use my computer, rather than my iphone. In fact I got my iphone only so that I could check my mobile pages. I had a land line at the time. As a result, I didn’t see that the lightening bolt wasn’t showing.)

Then, a few months ago my site began having some serious problems which seemed to be from my hosting, InMotion Hosting. One of their 24/7 techs took on my problem and found after some testing, that when he disabled the AMP plugin, the problems disappeared. So, I had a choice.

In the end I chose no AMP plugin so that my pages would load accurately. Then, I noticed that every so often I’d get referrals from cdn.ampproject.org. “Hmmmm,” I thought.

Then I remembered that when I was in the AMP study group the only way to update your AMP site, was to add a blog page. My site isn’t really a blog because the pages are all written to be lasting. So, to update my site during the study, I did a series of blog posts so that my regular pages would update.

Could it be, I wondered, that because I was in the study group my site is still somehow in the AMP Project, and when I update one of the old posts, or do a new blog post, cdn.ampproject.org wakes up my old amp site and serves my pages????

I did a blog post to see, and sure enough I suddenly got a lot of mobile traffic from cdn.ampproject.org.

So, I began doing a new page a week. But then, for some peculiar reason cdn.amproject.org began showing a page that very seldom had any visitors: Amplified Pain, and at the same time the page with hundreds of visitors began to get tens of visitors, almost none.

And, my Adsense ads began to pay a penny here and a penny there, whereas I used to earn a few dollars a day. It was going to take me a year to earn a hundred dollars, the threshold for getting paid. Distress/Depression ensued.

I could not work out why hundreds of people were suddenly visiting my Amplified Pain page. And, they weren’t EVER clicking on ads.

Finally I remembered Google Analytics. To my surprise, it showed that hundreds of people were going to my Amplified Pain page… and staying around 20 seconds. It clearly wasn’t what they were looking for. And, the length of their stays was in sharp contrast to the many minutes people spend reading my most viewed (previously) page: Vitamin B12 and Fingernails.

So, I put Vitamin B12 and Fingernails on the Amplified Pain page and sat watching Google Analytics RealTime. It was totally wonderful. People would arrive on Amplified Pain, and stay for four or five minutes reading Vitamin B12 and Fingernails.

Which apparently infuriated Google. Site visits fell to maybe three an hour, if I was lucky. So I returned Amplified Pain to its previous form, and … feel sad.