Google hates me

Yes, I admit it, I ego-surf. I go looking for mention of my books via Google, in the hope of finding nice reviews, and with only minor tantrums when I find reviews that are not 100% praise. I don't ego-surf that often, though, so it took me a while to realise that Google now hates me.

Once upon a time my personal website came top of any search on certain terms. Now it comes bottom. I suppose I should be grateful that it appears at all. It appears that I have fallen foul of the most recent round of changes in PageRanking intended to stop scammers from boosting their ranking on Google by manipulating the unseen page content. It is somewhat ironic that my best guess at what Google doesn't like about my site involves a couple of features that were intended to make the site more useful to yer actual human readers of the site. In particular, I use a CSS stylesheet that includes invisible text, as a rough-and-ready hack to provide extra info useful to disabled readers using text-only browsers. It's mostly extra internal page navigation links that allow people using things like JAWS to skip irrelevant menus, a tip I got from someone who designs accessible websites for a living. I've been thinking for a while that I really ought to think a bit harder about how to do those links so that they're visible in CSS browsers without cluttering up the page (which is why they're currently invisible in CSS browsers). I'd better move it up my priority list.

(The tantrums about less than ecstatic reviews really are minor, honest guv. If only because I know how suspicious I get when I see someone else's small press book with nothing but 5 star reviews, and am capable of applying that at home...)

(no subject)

The silkie story is now up to 14,000 words, and has acquired a working title: Spindrift.

The finished novella, on the other hand, has an unchanged word count but has acquired a new title. It started with the title I used for the short story it grew out of, but Mindscan is probably a rather more sane choice for a title that's going on a book cover rather than on an anthology contents page. For a start, the potential reader doesn't have to stop and work out how to pronounce it.

And in a break with my usual practice, I came up with a title for the planned sequel before doing anything other than scribbling some notes for said sequel. I will not jinx it by saying in public what it is. I already have quite enough of a tendency towards stories heading in a completely different direction to that planned, and I don't want to encourage my subconscious by giving it a title to make irrelevant.