Heartless

To stop Google from ignoring me, all I had to do was tear my heart out.

Last week I noticed that this blog had been cruelly dropped from Google and Yahoo. It seems I drove them away by, in effect, un-optimizing the blog for search engines. I made a few small changes, and now they like me again.

The smallest, easiest change may have made the biggest difference. I changed a post title from "We ♡ copyeditors" to "We (heart) copyeditors." Yahoo re-listed the blog the very next day, and Google took less than a week. Theother changes that happened in that week were were pretty small: I got one additional inbound link, and I stopped Babel-fishing posts into French and back to English. But I didn't do most of the things I planned: I didn't post more frequently and I didn't organize the blogroll. And my writing stayed just as random.

This isn't a controlled experiment or anything, but it seems that all I had to do was drop the "♡" symbol and spell it out.