Are Bloggers Victims of Social Media Algorithms?

Blogging & Are We Being Played?

There’s a lot in the news lately about the social media companies manipulating our children online to keep them engaged and how much harm it may be doing. It is obvious that these entities know a great deal about human psychology and how to take advantage of people online. I don’t think there is any doubt about what is happening and beyond our young children I’m sure that us bloggers are victums as well.

My involvement started as a simple interest but it quickly got out of control…

After starting my travel blogI devoted a lot of effort to exploring how to improve SEO, making use of social media, employing social networking, improving online presence and more but, the real question becomes is there really a straight forward process we can use to grow our website and improve search engine visibility? In my time on the internet I’ve discovered some surprising things and have developed some suspicions about tools and methods employed by the tech companies to keep us on the hook. There are a number of online tech companies that benefit from our efforts; web hosting companies, search engines that need results to display, social media sites that will do anything for traffic…

Who and Why
This travel site is a hobby (Intend2Travel.info). Among other things I was a photographer, I’m retired, in my late seventies and I and my wife live to travel. All continents and sub-continents, over 100 countries/islands and every one of the world/s oceans. I started with a free wordpress site over fourteen years ago to let friends and family see where I was and where I was going. It had nothing to do with money but as traffic increased and people visited and subscribed it may have become about validation. Fame and money seemed a remote possibility and it was my hobby.

Today I manage two free websites, a paid WordPress site (I ran out of free room) an online store site (very marginally breaking even) and almost a half dozen social media, sites along with an Etsy outlet. After all that, I confess that I understand very little about how to succeed on the internet.

A Suspicious Change
Some years ago my travel site experienced some serious quick growth and even today there are still large anomalies. Following is a chart showing results reported by Google data at an early period compared with the contributions from other search engines. Today over 5 years later I have almost two thousand subscribers and the average site traffic numbers are a number of times larger where my daily traffic is near the reported monthly traffic below..

The first traffic surge was in 2020 in Google search data for The Intentional Traveler site

No reports from Google were available prior to March 2020

Looking at the data it raises interesting questions:
1. The Google impressions show major changes in growing, peaking in May and falling off again.
2. The percentage of clicks per impressions also grow (from about 1% to 1.5%) with a peak in June and falling off again back to 1%.

3. The percentage of Google clicks to all other search engines starts at about 27%, grows to almost 57% and drops back over 3 months to 27%.

What do I make of this?

First, Google clicks seem to correlate somewhat with reported total impressions but do also grow as a percentage showing a deviation of about a half a percent (same bell shaped curve).
Second, various other search engine contributions as a percentage of total search referrals seem to remain constant with the exception of Googles contribution. Google’s share starts at just under 28% of total search referrals, grows to almost 47% in May and drops gradually back to under 28% (the bell curve again). All other search engines remain pretty constant.
Finally it leaves the impression that there is an operator at work outside of the seasonal flow of internet activity and searches.

Conclusions?: Google results do not seem to be part of a general algorithm pattern but statistically seem to be driven by a specifically targeted process applied to my website. Not just mine, I’m sure every site has similar activity.

Can anyone else offer any ideas? In the next couple of installments the plan is to explore the effectiveness in SEO efforts, techniques and practices that seem to have an impact on search activity and growing evidence that we may be involved in a giant feedback loop engineered by the big tech companies to keep us involved.

Over the past four or five years I’ve read hundreds of articles and subscribed to services promising to show me how to increase traffic with SEO tips. The biggest result I’ve seen is huge increases in my incoming emails but nothing I can point to regarding improving traffic. I’ve used an SEO plugin that evaluated every post. A vast number say the same things over and over and pretend that they are offering unique insights. The plugins seem to follow the usual set of rules as well.