Resize Equals Google Penalty?

I changed a link on a blog post yesterday and Google dropped it 50-odd places in the search rankings for its primary keyword. On one hand, it isn’t that big of deal, on the other hand, what if I changed all my pages, say for a resize?

A different site of mine, my freelance writing website is looking a little dated. When I started the business back in 2008, it made sense to go with the 800 px width, because that was considered the “safe” width that “everyone” had. Fluid layouts were still sort of sketchy because IE couldn’t support standards well and you never knew how it would end up looking

Now, I’m sure 1024, is more than safe and fluid layouts are generally fine if done well. 

But, after my experience with Google hammering a webpage’s ranking because of a small change, I’m worried about changing my business website. It’s not like it ranks 1st for freelance writing or even freelance writer Colorado or freelance writer Denver (maybe that will help :) but it does alright for businesses and others who are actually looking to hire someone like me.

I guess my plan is to change when I take vacation in the summer and then hope it recovers during the few weeks I’m gone.

Anyone else go through this?

Am I just be paranoid?

Freelance Writing Blog Traffic Drop

I’ve been wondering why I saw a drop in traffic to my freelance writing blog recently. It seemed like my web pages on the site continued to rank in approximately the same order as they did before the traffic drop, but there was just less incoming visitors.

It turns out that while the positions of some of my articles remain the same in Google search results, the number of people looking for that information has plummeted. For example, I have several articles about writing for Demand Studios, but now that Demand Studios shut down for most writers, no one searches for information about writing for them anymore. 

No big deal, but at least I don’t have to worry that something is going on that I can’t figure out. I hate when I have data that I can’t explain.

WordPress Spellcheck or Firefox Spell Check Glitch

Ted, strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Not sure what is going on here, but today, for whatever reason, whenever I am typing a blog post into the WordPress interface dashboard, or whatever it is called, I get this weird autocorrect spellcheck behavior happening.

Unlike typical spell-check and auto-correct, this correction takes control of the screen and backspaces over the word I typed and then inserts the correct word in its place. Of course, by then, I’ve already typed more letters, or tried to fix it myself. I touch-type close to 100 words per second when I’m really writing well, so it’s no stretch that the autocorrect is behind me sometimes.

The weird part, is that I’m not sure where it came from or why it started.

I upgraded to WordPress 3.0 at least last week and haven’t noticed it before today. Of course, I usually post via Windows Live Writer or some other mechanism, so it is possible that I just have not used the built-in WordPress editor before today and that the new auto-correct features is updated in WordPress 3.

If that isn’t it, one would assume that it is due to the browser. I use a combination of Firefox and Chrome as my browsers with Firefox typically doing the heavy lifting and most of the blog posting, not in the least because it has all the usernames and passwords already saved. I updated my Firefox Tabs plug-in earlier today, but that seems an unlikely culprit for a spell check thing.

I suppose the next move in troubleshooting a computer problem like this one is to see if the behavior replicates in other browsers. If I don’t get odd spell check in Chrome, then it must be a Firefox issue. If I DO get odd spell check in Chrome, then it must be a WordPress issue.

I might be back to update with a solution, but I might also forget all about it, depending upon how annoying it gets before I fix it :)

So that I feel like I got mileage out of this longer than expected explanation, here is a link to something I wrote about earlier. How to hire a freelance writer is aimed at businesses and managers who might need to contract with a professional writer for the first time, or even for those who wish getting good writers to work on projects was easier.

Llama Out.