I’ve posted before, along with pestering friends and fellow geeks, with my big MacSparky problem since moving it to its own server. Specifically, I was dead to Google (and every other search engine). I knew this must be a simple problem but it was a bit disheartening to see that little box in my web stats that shows nobody was stumbling upon my ramblings with a search engine. The good news was that I still have a pretty good following of people that carry my feed and the numbers were still pretty acceptable. Maybe that is why it took me so long to get to the root of it.
Regardless, through a friend I talked to someone at Google and they were baffled. I wrote several emails to my hosting provider, Dreamhost, to which they very nicely told me it may just because my content isn’t that good. Well, THAT most certainly could not be the problem.
Last night I had some time on my hands and decided I was going to go through every line of every menu on my Wordpress settings and sure enough, buried deep inside, there was a check box called “Privacy” with a big ugly check next to it. I know I never set that but, alas, there it was. I unchecked it and this morning I find that MacSparky.com is no longer one great big black hole in the internet and people are actually finding me again. So there you have it, operator error at the root of my problems . . . again.