Simon Owens has done the legwork and he’s revealed that the Litblog Co-Op site has been blacklisted from Google. In fact, I’ve performed a few Google searches for “Valerie Trueblood” and “Stephen Graham Jones” and these names don’t come up at all in the first five pages.
This issue has been broached to the group and we’re now discussing options, including switching over to WordPress if need be. It’s a great pity that the hard work of the nominated authors kind enough to volunteer their time to guest blog and answer questions, the many contributors and readers who have discussed the books, the podcast interviews, and the like simply aren’t accessible to the search engines.
The moral of the story: if you have a Typepad account, you may want to check your search engine ranking. It’s very possible that you’re speaking into dead air.
[UPDATE: It appears that there's a line in our source code deflecting search engines.]
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
That’s funny. I’m on Typepad and most of my traffic comes from Google.
The downside to that is what search strings bring people there.
Most frightening was Harry Potter slashfic.
Squick.
That’s what I initially suspected, glad you were able to get to the bottom of it. Google search engine traffic is valuable, it would be a shame if it couldn’t be used to promote the books at LBC
Yeah, I noticed that recently, too. Thought it was strange but then forgot about it. Is it something that can be easily corrected (in the source code)?
I saw what bloggasm wrote about the noindex problem.
You don’t need to leave TypePad, just go into the “configure” tab for that blog and select “Yes” for “Publicize this Weblog:” Then republish the site (in the design tab). That’s it – you’ll soon be indexed.
In fact, other than the noindex thing, which must have been inadvertently set on the LBC site, the LBC site is more SE friendly than Edrants because One thing search engines like is post names rather than numbers or characters in URLs (on Chekhov’s Mistress I’ve even put my name in my URLs).
You can change your WP URLs on your blog here – In your WordPress Admin screen, Go to the “Options” tab, select the “Permalinks” tab and select “Date and name based” or do a custom one with post name.) You’ll get a slowdown in google hits until the search engines reindex you (although you can speed that up by submitting a sitemap to google), but it won’t last long.
Oh, while I’m at it. If you were going to switch, you may want to look at expression engine (pmachine.com). It’s what the Valve uses and what I use for Metaxucafe because it’s great for groups (of course, it’s not free, but it’s a superior system to the rest).
Bud is right, you don’t need to move to WordPress. If the LBC does decide to change platforms or move to its own domain be VERY careful how you handle the change or you may end up losing your link traffic in addition to being dropped from Google.