Wesley's Tool-Box

It's been about two weeks since my new book officially went on sale at various online and offline bookstores around Korea. The book saw its interest surging the subsequent Monday (August 30, 2021), and so it peaked at 32nd position of the tech / engineering online weekly bestsellers at Kyobo Book Centre the next day.

The wave has somewhat calmed down at the moment, but for some reason Naver has now decided to label it as a bestseller. I first spotted the red tag on September 4, before disappearing just a day after. It then returned today (September 7). I'm not sure what this classification is based on, but I guess the book is doing well.

It's been more than a month since I revamped the site to be mobile friendly. Yet it takes quite a bit of time for Google to re-crawl all those pages and realize that they're have been changes. As you can see here, Google Mobile Usability Report still thinks roughly 15% of the indexed pages still aren't mobile friendly despite the fact that the template update affected the entire site at once. These pages would still show up in the search results without the "Mobile Friendly" tag and be ranked lower. I guess I'll have to wait a few more weeks.

Number of visitors coming from search engines indicate how much information of current interest exist on the website.

Looking back about three years, the search visitors peaked around the end of 2011 and went into a steady decline. Excluding the long-running web comic "The Toon-Box", the site had a new blog post every few months since the current framework went up in 2005 until a product review was posted in August 2011 and stopped altogether. It seems that, with the lack of any new stuff, the visitors naturally dwindled.

By the way, "The Toon-Box" series went into hiatus in July 2009 before returning in December 2013, but it didn't have any tags or indexes, so it was largely invisible to the search engines. To fix this problem, tags were introduced upon its return. I'm planning to add tags to the old comics as time allows.

But the truly interesting thing was the 2-month server downtime between February and March of 2013 caused by the iMac failure. Because the site went away for so long, the search engines probably de-indexed the pages, leading to a significantly reduced number of search visitors for several months following the restoration.

The visitor numbers would once again pick up in November 2013. This was shortly after I posted several pages of detailed review on iPhone 5S a month before. Now the daily number of search visitors is back to the old level again. I guess the search engines finally realized that the site is back in business.