For the last 10 days, I have experienced a *dramatic* drop in my site traffic and the primary culprit, after some inspection, appears to be WordPress Reader. I went from Reader being a pretty good secondary source of traffic (behind search engine traffic) to getting significantly fewer viewers through that vector.
I don’t really care that much, because one does not post about Latin phrases, or give poetry reviews, for the fame and notoriety. That said, I am curious if anyone knows whether there has been a change to the algorithm or something that might be keeping “DustyReviews” from showing up on the Reader for my subscribers. I don’t mind making small changes to what I do if it helps the site to show up more effectively.
I am having a recurring problem with liking some bloggers comments; it is hit or miss. Check out Renards’s page at https://renardsworld.wordpress.com/. He posts about WordPress problems and has much technical knowledge. I believe he is a tester for the app, but I am not positive.
Thank you! That’s really helpful, I will give that a look.
I think you’re using too many tags in some of your posts. If you use more than fifteen tags and categories combined, your post won’t be shown on the Reader or tag pages.
Thanks! That is really good info! Just for some more intel (either for you or anyone else who sees this, in case it helps someone else):
I only ever select 1 category per post. I’m weirdly obsessive about that, even if it would help me to click more than one. The formatting of what I write lends itself pretty well to just clicking on one, though.
I definitely use 15+ tags for my Wheel of Time posts, but I’ve been doing that for 4 years and never had a problem with Reader until recently. There’s a purpose behind the tags choice on those posts and I do it even though I know it’s not SEO friendly. The only other posts where I think I might get close to 15 tags are some of my movie posts, but honestly that’d be rare. I’ll go check though. Most of my posts are 5-10 tags.
I’ve recently noticed that the algorithm has changed so if you use too many tags on one post it’ll shadowban you for a while which causes a decrease in traffic. The same thing happened to another blogger I follow. I think it wasn’t really much of an issue before but is definitely an issue now.
But it could also definitely be something else. Maybe traffic is just low these days.
I think the “tags” theory is probably the best one. There was just too big a drop and for too long for the drop to be part of the natural ebb and flow. But I’ll be careful for a while and see if I can get the ban lifted.
Yeah, it’s usually okay after a bit so just be extra careful while that.
It’s been showing up in the reader for me FWIW
That’s good to know. It’s weird. I have had really steady growth for about 6 months and then abruptly the floor fell out for more than a week. This past week I had half the site traffic that I had at the end of March.
I waited long enough to make sure it wasn’t just kind of a fluke before I posted about it. I’ve noticed in the past that sometimes people I read stop showing up on Reader (even though they didn’t stop posting,) but I’ve never bothered to really pay attention to how that works.