Are Bloggers Wasting Their Time Tinkering with Their Blogs in the Hopes of Getting More Readers?

I suspect at this stage of things that most of those who started blogging have been less than thrilled with their results--certainly to go by the vast number of bloggers who quit the endeavor, often after just a little while. They were given the impression that what goes online is necessarily seen by vast numbers of people, that they would not be crazy to expect the things they put up to "go viral," that they could end up web celebrities.

Instead they mostly found themselves ignored--and when not ignored often insulted. Indeed, many may have been disappointed to find that rather than persistence paying off they have got less and less result with time--finding the search engines less likely to index their posts than before, seeing less and less evidence of actual humans reading their blog by leaving a comment or posting a link, as they suspect that what page views they get are spam, bots, and the rest.

There is no great mystery in this. The reality is that online the ratio of people looking for attention is extremely high relative to those ready to pay attention. The reality is that the great majority of Internet usage is passive, with any kind of engagement a rarity (very, very few of those who do find anything likely to share it with others). The reality is that, where the blogger especially is concerned, the Internet has been moving away from full-bodied text toward shorter-form content (like microblogging) and audiovisual experience (the vlogger rather than even the microblogger). And as if all this did not suffice to mean that things were going from bad to worse the game is entirely rigged at every level in favor of big names, big money, those with legacy media connections, and the other advantages.

Alas, these obvious realities are something few are ready to admit--instead what prevails a stupid meritocratic-aspirationalist view that treats every outcome as the result of a tough but fair test of individual talent and effort. And even those who can see through that stupidity often do not simply shrug their shoulders, but strive instead for a better outcome. One way is by trying to get search engines to treat them more favorably (indexing more of their items, ranking them more highly in search results, etc.), the more in as many a would-be advice-giver claims to know what will do the trick.

Should they post more frequently, or less frequently? Should they go for longer posts, or shorter ones? Are there too many links in their posts, or not enough? Is it a mistake to have so many internal links--for instance, posts that provide handy collections of links to past posts? Should they be weeding out old posts that perhaps did not get looked at as much as others? And so on and so forth. They will hear a lot of advice (typically vague yet completely contradictory advice, supported by no evidence whatsoever)--and if acting on it, spend a lot of time on things that have nothing to do with actual blogging.

My experience is that all that hassle will not accomplish much for most of them, for many reasons. My personal suspicion is that the infrequency with which search engines "crawl" your blog means that it will be a long time before you get any positive result, even if you really do achieve one, which seems to me doubtful. I suspect that the search engines are simply overwhelmed by the amount of content out there, and the efforts to manipulate it--to the extent that they are not catering to the sponsors, demands for censorship, etc. that doubtless tie up much in knots even beyond the direct effect of such corruption of search results (and that half-baked experiments with artificial intelligence are likely lousing things up further). The result is that they probably ought to spare themselves the trouble--and, if they really think their blogging has any meaning at all, get on with that instead.