Real Sex, Nina Hartley, and the Googlebot, Part 2
Well something is definately up.
On November 7th, the day after I posted Real Sex, Nina Hartley, and the Googlebot, our Google-driven traffic dropped by 40%, and has stayed there for the last week.
Okay, fine. No one, not even Comstock Films is entitled to high Google rankings.
But while our overall Google traffic has dropped by 40% in the last week, our visitors on the search [nina hartley] have doubled, and that’s on top of the ~400% increase reported in my first post. In fact, [nina hartley] is now our #2 search term, outranking [real sex] or even [tony comstock]. (Meanwhile, our visitors on the search [real sex] have virtually dried up altogether.)
I’m not happy about losing our [real sex] visitors; they were among our best search related customers (second best actually.) But I’m even less happy seeing that once again, Google seems to be dicking around with their sex-related search just ahead of the holiday season, and in there dicking around, they seem to have come up with a picture of our site that just isn’t accurate. We’re getting visitors we shouldn’t get, and people who are probably looking for exactly what we offer are getting sent somewhere else.
I’m a filmmaker, but I am also a merchant, and like any other merchant, this is an important time of year for us. In the last year we’ve done a lot to be less dependent on search-driven sales to make ends meet, but those sales are still an important part of how we’re able to pay our bills. A 40% drop in Google-driven visitors can’t be good for us, and could be very bad.
