Day 5. Be My Guest

October 2nd 2018

What’s going on I hear you cry! Or at least the ones paying attention: How come ‘Day 5’ isn’t the day after ‘Day 4’? Well, it’s not the 5th day since I started on this project; it’s the 5th day that I did something significant! I’m generally not doing more than one specific task on any given day so this system does have the advantage of showing the total number of tasks performed so far. I think it makes sense anyway, and as it’s my blog we’re going to stick with it for now! Some tasks have taken more time than others and I have been doing other things with my life, so please don’t think you will need to dedicate a whole day to each of these things necessarily if you want to join in the fun. Some have been quite straightforward and some, like the last one (Better Safe than Sorry) have been more involved and ongoing.

Having made the site secure I was concerned that suddenly we would disappear, that all the links to our old site (http…) would not find the new one (https…). I knew that wasn’t supposed to be the case but I still spent the next few days changing whatever links I could find on whatever other sites I could find us on. I also kept an eye on Google Search Console, where, I am happy to say we have eventually been properly indexed (took a few weeks though, so don’t panic if you also make this move). Since I didn’t want to take on any new tasks until I was happy with how the switch had gone we worked at the Grange instead (more gardening!) and then took a day off to go to Torquay!

Where Allison and I attended the Be My Guest South West Roadshow an event aimed at the accommodation industry, with various helpful stands and several interesting guest speakers. I was particularly interested because one of the guest speakers was Gosbert Chagula from Google Digital Garage and he was going to talk about a lot of the things I have been grappling with lately. There was no Google stand unfortunately, probably sensibly, as it would have been swamped, but Gosbert did give three excellent talks and I did get to have a brief chat with him afterwards. I’d have asked him a lot more, but not surprisingly there was a queue forming. He was a very knowledgeable and engaging speaker and although we got little from the rest of the event (apart from some very nice cake!), he just about made the trip worthwhile all on his own. He had much to say but for me, the clearest message I came away with was that Google is looking for ‘good, fresh content’ most of all and the sites with the ‘most good, fresh content’ are the sites that should be appearing at the top of the search lists. I’m not sure how much that is actually true and how much that is just the message they are pushing out to try and make it true, but still, that’s probably what we should all be aiming for! As for our chat, I asked him about the next task on my list – backlinks – and as he didn’t discourage me you’ll find Day 6 is all about that! ‘Good, fresh content’ is for another day…