{"id":11,"date":"2013-07-19T02:56:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T02:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/big-changes-coming-to-the-blog\/"},"modified":"2013-07-19T02:56:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T02:56:00","slug":"big-changes-coming-to-the-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/big-changes-coming-to-the-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Changes Coming to the Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"
This is the same post I ran yesterday at Adventures Fantastic<\/a>.\u00a0 The readership of the two blogs overlaps quite a bit but isn’t identical.\u00a0 I’m reposting the announcement here in case anyone missed it.\u00a0 If you saw it yesterday, it’s the same thing, verbatim. <\/p>\n

Traffic the last few days has been up quite a bit, so when traffic today was down, I wasn’t too worried.\u00a0 I’ve noticed that trend before, a drop in hits on the day following higher than usual traffic, even thought the traffic drop today is greater than usual.<\/p>\n

Then I noticed something in my inbox.\u00a0 It was from Google.\u00a0 It had come in overnight, and at first glance I thought it was spam that had slipped through the filter.\u00a0 Instead it was accusing this blog of being spam.\u00a0 The second line read, in part, “As a result of your site having pure spam, Google has applied a manual spam action…”<\/p>\n

Excuse me!?!
<\/a>
I’m not sure what is going on here.\u00a0 Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say that if I post a lot of content from other sites with links back to those site but don’t provide original content, then the site is a spam site.\u00a0 Reviews of products with links back to other sites are not considered spam sites by the terms of the Guidelines.<\/p>\n

Yes, I include links to a book’s page, publisher’s page, author’s page, and vendors (Amazon, etc.) as well as a copy of the cover.\u00a0 I do this as a courtesy to anyone who might be interested in the book.\u00a0 But there will always be plenty of original content.\u00a0 I also post rants and opinion pieces, news items if I hear about them soon enough, trip reports, and the occasional obituary or tribute.\u00a0 And while I am an Amazon associate, as duly noted at the bottom of the page, I’ve never made enough money ($10, cummulative) from it for Amazon to pay me.\u00a0 In other words, to the best of my knowledge I am not nor ever have been in violation of Google’s Guidelines.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure how this blog got flagged as a “pure spam” since there are (at a guess) hundreds, if not thousands, of book related blogs out there that do essentially what I do in pretty much the same way I do it.\u00a0 Futures Past and Present<\/a> wasn’t included in the spam classification.\u00a0 Just Adventures Fantastic.<\/p>\n

So either something at Google flagged as spam or else someone reported this site as spam.\u00a0 Frankly, I can’t imagine who would do that or why.\u00a0 I have intentionally stayed out of most of the controversies in the field at the moment.\u00a0 I don’t usually write totally negative reviews.\u00a0 My intention isn’t to trash someone’s work.\u00a0 If I absolutely hate something, I usually don’t review it, assuming I even finish reading it in the first place.\u00a0 In my post at Amazing Stories <\/a>this week, I did write a pretty negative review.\u00a0 (Okay, yeah, I pretty much trashed the book, but it was a biography, not fiction, and the standards of quality are different.)<\/p>\n

I submitted a reconsideration request.\u00a0 The response I got was that it would take a few weeks before they changed anything, if they did.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to wait that long.\u00a0 I bought a domain name earlier this year with the intention of self publishing some of my own work.\u00a0 Being a creature of inertia, I’ve not made the time to get up the learning curve on that yet, I’m about to.\u00a0 I’ll still review the items I listed a few posts ago, but August may be pretty sparse. I’m going to be switching blogging platforms and transferring everything from here and Futures over there as well as getting some things up for sale.\u00a0 If anyone has some suggestions about the best way to go about that, I’d appreciate hearing them.\u00a0 I want to move all 500+ blog posts over.\u00a0 I’m familiar with WordPress, but I don’t know if it will let me do that.<\/p>\n

Once the site is up, I’ll post a notice here.\u00a0 At that point everything will move over to the new site. <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the same post I ran yesterday at Adventures Fantastic.\u00a0 The readership of the two blogs overlaps quite a bit but isn’t identical.\u00a0 I’m reposting the announcement here in case anyone missed it.\u00a0 If you saw it yesterday, it’s the same thing, verbatim. Traffic the last few days has been up quite a bit, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-b","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}