Siusic Dot Com

In my previous blog income report I mentioned that my blog traffic was down observably after I upgrade WordPress to 2.50. I believe I found what was going on. I believe it have to do with the new configuration settings in WordPress’ config file. Starting WordPress version 2.2, there are two more configuration settings related to character set and collation

define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);
It turns out that with these two settings on there are many strange characters appear on every post. In fact with these two settings on some of the single quote, double quote and hyphen characters become weird characters, something like this ’.

So how does this affect blog traffic? The reason is simple. Most of my blog’s traffic is from search engine referral. People go to Google type in some keyword and click search and my post would appear in the search result. In order to do so Google will have to first index the content of my post and the indexing process is to break down a post word by word. A search engine indexing usually strip off the single quote and double quote. For example “WordPress” is indexed as WordPress. And my post may appear in the result of a search for WordPress. However if the double quote became ’ then “WordPress” will become ’WordPress’. Google or other search engine may treat it as a word and will not strip off the ’. If that is the case my post will not appear in a search for WordPress. That will cause search engine referral traffic down observably.

So this is my theory. I have remove the two configure settings and the weird characters should be all gone. After the blog is index by Google again the blog traffic should be up from current level. The highest daily number of visitors is 228 after the Upgrade. Before the upgrade the daily number of visitor can be easily surpass 300. We will test whether this theory is correct in the next blog income report. Specifically we will see whether daily number of visitor is able to surpass 300 in the rest of the month.

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