Workshopping Poetry

One of the things I like about this blog is that I can go back to older posts and see the origin of one of my poems. I will often post a poem that is raw. It has good parts, but it isn’t good, or better yet it isn’t complete. I think my hope or idea was that I could start more of a dialogue with readers around the poetry, where they could offer feedback on the poems themselves and help me to improve the raw work. In the long run I had even hoped that maybe other people would want to also post their poetry here and it would be kindly, but constructively critiqued. That never happened, and I’m really to blame with my inconsistent posting. Yet, I still followed the same pattern of posting something, reworking it and then posting it again. In fact there are several renditions of the same poem on this blog. It was fun to go back and see the changes. I don’t know if it was something of interest to my readers, as I received little engagement, but it was a good record for me personally. However, I think if I want to move forward with this blog, all that will have to change.

Google and Low Quality Content

What is low quality content? There are many resources where you can read about low and high quality content based on Google’s standards, for example Page One Power’s post comes up first if you google search, “What is low-quality content according to Google?” The Google algorithm has had a number of updates recently and it has had an impact on a lot of blogs. I normally don’t care much since I’m not very literate in the world of SEO (obviously) but this time it did have a direct impact. I lost a job opportunity as a contributing author. Now, I may not have been hired, this is a possibility, but due to the changes to the algorithm, they decided not to hire anyone.

It was a bit of a disappointment, but the work was more about a side hustle and some writing cred, but it didn’t impact my income. What it did do though is cause me to look at all the hub-bub surrounding the recent updates. And, after a little bit of reading and some video watching, I started thinking about my personal blogs, especially this one, A Chatoyant Fleck.

More is No Longer Better and How that Hurts Me

I was never writing here to gain as many followers as possible. Sure, I have added a donation button, but that’s just because I’d like to keep the blog’s annual subscription fee, and like many people, I am living paycheck to paycheck and sometimes when that annual fee comes around, I have to choose between a bill pay or keeping this running.

I do want followers of course. I want people to read my poetry. I want to get better at poetry, and have a community of poets and writers, but I’m not trying to compete with established poets, nor am I trying to dominate the very small poetry market. But, I’d like to be seen.

I already have a low engagement, weak SEO skills, and all the negative check marks. It’s a poetry workshop blog, after all. I don’t care about keywords, and I never check the analytics on this blog. I never wrote content for the sake of content. I wrote for the sake of working on a poem and hoping someone might engage. A lot of my content is low-quality. There are grammatical errors, no answers to people’s questions, and misspellings (I’m certain). There is also a lot of repetition that can be misread by Google as an attempt to manipulate the spiders into reaching my blog and crawling my words out to the web. In the past, having low-quality content wasn’t great, but it didn’t hurt you. Now, that has changed. Low-quality content can hurt your blog.

Trash it All (or At Least a Lot of It)

It looks like, if I do want Google to recommend me to the poetry lovers of the blogosphere, I’m going to have to trash the old raw versions of my poems. This will take a lot of work. I am going to have to be more purposeful in how I post my work if I want to continue with the “workshop” approach, and I’m not sure how I’m going to do that, so I need to think on it. It is also going to slow down posting, which is hilarious, because my postings are already inconsistent. If you write poetry, you know it takes a long time to write a poem. It can be a short time to write the raw poem, but the revision process takes a long time, especially if you are not a professional poet whose job it is to write poems, therefore you are writing and revising poems daily (I presume).

So, that’s where I am at the moment. I also have other blogs, which I need to clean up. It would be easier to just scrap it all and delete it, but I like this. I like writing poems. So, this project is certainly a passion project. I’m not certain what I am going to do or how I will approach these changes, but I’m committed to do something.