HermanMunster - 2:10 am on May 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

My Google referrers were up over the weekend about 50%, and I've seen some small improvement of a few positions for a few terms, short and long. No improvement for what I would call my main keywords that remain on the first page but dropped several positions, which was enough to take a big chunk out of my traffic.

I have been redesigning my site since before this all started, so I've been continuing with those plans. That makes it hard to say exactly what might be helping. I did delete my blogroll last Wednesday, mainly because I already have those sites on a single resources page for visitors and I didn't want my sitewide links to have a negative effect on them. I think it's a quality/convenience downgrade for my visitors though, and Google's hypocrisy on that issue really irks me. Most link back to me as well, but there was never any nefarious plot to do so. We just post about the same non-profit cause, so we're interested in what the others are saying. Might share a tip 2 or 3 times per year, but we don't collaborate. That's some evil linking scheme.

The only other obvious things I did was to delete a couple of old blogs of mine a couple of weeks ago that were an offshoot of the main blog. They had a different but related focus, but were all interlinking. Hadn't updated them in several years and I had pretty much forgotten about them until I started digging to fix this problem, and one had been compromised with a spam injection. That's important, I'm sure, but the site is still indexed so I don't know if that would have shown a positive effect yet.

Another thing I noticed almost by accident today is that Google stopped caching my Twitter page on April 19th. I never paid attention to that in the past so I don't know how often they renewed the cache before, but the date has to be more than coincidence. Makes me wonder if anyone creating a new Twitter page in reaction to Penguin will see any benefit from it.