Well I thought I would update the blog with my name on it. I know – shocker, right? Here is what has been happening in my world.
Many of you will know of me through my music, primarily the Raven Boy Music albums and songs I do primarily for the medieval re-creation group The Society for Creative Achronism (SCA for short). But what I’ve been spending most of my time on is a project called Home Brew Audio, which is a web business I created to teach people about audio recording so they can do it themselves. The idea is to provide lots of free content in the posts and via Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, etc. with tips, videos, audio examples, and equipment reviews. There are also tutorial video courses and eBooks. I also want the site to be a place where people can get the equipment they need.
Things were actually going pretty well with www.homebrewaudio.com. Lots of people were visiting the site regularly, signing up for the mailing list, commenting on posts, etc. And then came the dreaded Google update of April 24th, 2012. That update was nicknamed Penguin.
Penguin was designed to penalize sites that were using spam-like tactics to manipulate search engine rankings. The examples of sites Google was going after were those that simply stuffed their web sites with keywords or just stole content from other websites and spun (using a program to replace words and phrases with similar words and phrases – the result is usually an unintelligible mish-mash) that content to try to make it look unique. One other thing Google was trying to stop was “over-optimization” in linking.
Of course search-engine optimization (SEO) is something every web business is supposed to do in order to make it easier for people to find you when they search for things related to your site. Google even teaches people how to optimize their sites for that. One was that search engines decide what sites to put ahead of others is by looking at how many “inbound links” a site has for a particular keyword. Basically, the more inbound links you had to your site, the better it would rank in the search engines. So as with any system, people will find a way to abuse it. Services offering to build in-bound links to your site using relevant keywords in the anchor text became quite popular.
So to make a long story short (too late, I know:)), www.homebrewaudio.com was caught in the wide net intended for bad actors (yes, that was me saying I don’t think I was a bad actor) when Penguin rolled out. All attempts to address and fix the issue have so far been unsuccessful. So I felt I had no choice but to start a fresh site and put all new articles and posts up there. Last week I bought http://homebrewaudio.co and started putting the new content there. The idea is to be ultra super careful about any linking I do to the new site so that I can get the content back up in the search engine rankings where people can find it.
So that has been taking a lot of my time and will continue to do so for awhile.
I have also been busy doing voice-over work.
But on the music front – I’ve been recording Andrew Heinrich (Don Mateo in the SCA) so he can release his next CD. And I also plan to have a new CD out for Gulf Wars 2013. We will not be going to Pennsic this year.
So there is an update.
Cheers!
Ken
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