Google’s lost my blog

Last month I moved my main developer blog from cleverbuilder.com to tomd.xyz. And somehow I seem to have lost most of my traffic. Oops.

I decided to move URL, because I want to give my developer blog a more personal feel.

I want to give my blog a simple identity that bears more relation to me as the author, rather than some random brand, Clever Builder, which sounded a bit corporate and doesn’t really reflect where I am in 2019.

What a disaster so far. In Google Search Console, my site’s search appearances and clicks have plummeted. Overnight, my visitors went from about 600 per day, to almost zero.

I went through Google’s recommended actions in the event of a traffic drop. I feared that maybe I’d been penalised for switching URLs. But I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, and there are no manual actions listed inside Search Console.

So I’m stumped. This has been continuing for about two weeks.

At the moment I’m not sure what to do, but I’ll wait a couple of weeks more, to see if it’s just a blip.

Thank god this isn’t how I make a living! This has made me realise that being solely at the mercy of Google for your traffic (and income) must be a very precarious place to be.

Fingers crossed I get my lovely visitors back soon…

In the meantime, here’s my most recent article I published on the site: S2I builds in OpenShift - an example with Java and Maven