A week ago I chased a rabbit down a hole and found myself in a wonderland of misery. I went to a lunch and learn on websites focused on SEO. Now I have done a lot of work recently on my website. I am trying to improve its organic ranking so good things can finally happen there. It has been a some work. A fair amount of it. So when I tested it with a Google native tool and everything went red I went into panic mode.
The end result of this is I created a zeroth law for myself to sanity check any action before undertaking it. However that isn’t what I did here. Instead I dove straight down that rabbit hole and found myself staring at the entire CSS code of the website debating ripping a small part out. The issue that was discovered was an old Google Analytics tracker. It is unneeded now and is causing the page to load a split millisecond slower. If I had simply run a competitors site through the same hole I never would have chased this rabbit.
Instead I went right on down that hole. Not eating my lunch and being distracted from the learning. I was too busy diving into this hole. When the event ended I went home unresolved and continued the chase. Eventually I discovered there was nothing I could do and switched to trying to add our site to local directors. The only one we’re really missing is Apple Maps and well I failed there too.
I didn’t know it until this morning because my Apple account is attached to an email I no longer use and I kept forgetting to check it. This morning I finally did and discovered that they rejected my claim on my business because we haven’t been sent our updated business license from the city yet. It is frustrating, but out of my control, and not a big enough of a deal to worry about. Google rules this world and while all tech companies have equally piss poor customer service I am not going to deal with it.
I learned my lesson last week. Don’t go chasing rabbits are you’ll end up like Alice when she was 10 feet tall.
David Huzzard Writes 