On December 27, 2005, Google must have released a new index, because all of a sudden referrals spiked up 10 fold to Interment.net, our largest property.

Back in October, Google referrals dropped a ton of bricks, about 10 fold. And now, it's back up 10 fold.

This has actually been the case going back by nearly three years. It used to be that Google referrals gradually increased with every new index they released. Then in May of 2003, referrals gradually went down over the next several months. Then it started going back up, and then down, and then up, and it's been roller coaster ever since.

In November, we did make a significant change to Interment, in that our "What's New" page was converted to a blog. Did that do anything to boost our Google referrals? We've also been slowly converting our index pages to the new format. Did that do anything to boost Google referrals?

Who knows!

I'm basically throwing my hands up in defeat in that you can't count on Google being consistent. Interment is very much the kind of website that Google ought to love: full of original content, content you can't find anywhere else, content that's high in demand from our audience, real content that's actually consumed and appreciated by real human beings. Yet, in their zest to punish the spam sites and link farms, we get caught up in their nets, and are punished for part of the year.

Obviously, Google ought to do their best to remove the spam sites and link farms from their index. But it's odd that seemingly every index either punishes us, or rewards us, without us really doing anything different.