This month, this humble blog has lost upwards of 20% of its reader traffic–which I’ve put down to referrals from Facebook suddenly drying up for no reason I can discover.
But the Chicago Tribune has lost a lot of traffic, too; and they’re saying it’s because of Facebook censoring much of their content as “fake news” ( http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/04/19/chicago-tribune-accuses-facebook-fake-news-killing-web-traffic/). So it turns out I’m not the only one.
I’ve been reading reports from various media sources, and some of them are saying that Facebook has censored links to major conservative news sites, like Drudge and Breitbart, and is also experimenting with some means of flagging certain items as “satire,” and hence not to be believed. Killjoys.
Here we link to articles in Drudge or Breitbart rather often, and I’ve been known to cook up a satirical piece now and then. Well, all right–a bit more than now and then.
But does this explain where all my referrals have disappeared to? I don’t know: I don’t understand computer stuff well enough to make sense of these reports.
I must admit, though, to a certain satisfaction in seeing big fat liberal news media complaining that now their stuff is getting censored, too. Like, who was it that wanted all this censorship in the first place? Who was doing the loudest hissing and moaning about “fake news”? They asked for censorship, they got it, and it turned around and bit them. (Not a dry eye in the house!)
None of which gets my referrals back, or restores my viewership to what it had been for five months in a row until this month came along.
If any of you out there are Facebook-savvy, please enlighten us.
Caught in a web of their own making.
I can’t prove this, but I think that your lack of referrals probably comes down to censorship, plain and simple. We have a group of Millennials controlling huge segments of the Internet and they see you and I as irrelevant old fogies because we believe in a Higher Power. Starving you of referrals seems only fair to these characters.
The software manufacturers and Internet mavens whom operate the search engine and social media sites have tremendous power these days. They can effectively lay siege to a business, or to a political school of thought with whom they disagree. This is serious, “mark of the beast” sort of business and it’s happening all around us.
And I still don’t know any way to get referrals generated.
I wish I could think of something, but if they are hindering referrals to sites with Christian or Conservative content, there may not be much which can be done. It might blow over, if there is serious pushback from larger companies which are affected and have the budget for legal action.
I’m not blowing smoke when I mention the mark of the beast. My personal opinion is that this is one manifestation thereof. If so, all you can do is soldier on and accept this as persecution.
They are using computer software code, to “re-direct” the traffic to your site. You need have someone who knows what to do, run some analytics on your traffic. Fix the re-directs.
Since I wrote that, my referrals are back and my readership is back. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right. It’s very hard to understand these things when one does not have the vocabulary.