My personal web site - which actually is not particularly interesting, IMHO - used to get in a lot of traffic via Google. It was highly ranked on several quite interesting search terms. For example, it's still number 1 on the search term "Halbleiterlaser" (semiconductor laser), which is the topic of my secondary school thesis. So I still win against Wikipedia on this one. For "flowers" I sometimes and up at #1 in Google image search (causing lots of people to hot-link certain images from my site... might be with some geo targeting though?) But I've lost other battles to Wikipedia by now, such as the search term "Liebeskummer" ("lovesickness"; I have some old old poetry online that people dig a lot; this still makes up the biggest share of my visitors)

My rankings have dropped quite a lot the last year, down about 50% within a year. I don't know if this is because I'm blogging a lot less, because I'm not updating it often enough or because Google doesn't like the redesign as much as it did like the old one. (The redesign was 2 years ago, followed by a drop in visitor numbers but a recovery to like 70% within a month)

Algorithmic changes of Googles ranking are just another possible reason; I always felt as if my placement was highly overrated anyway.

I added at a Google sitemap some months ago and other things that people expect to help with their site being well included, but it didn't stop the numbers from going further down. For obvious reasons I didn't buy any links or anything; I'm not making my living with that page or anything, it's just a pet project thingy. (So obviously, don't make me any SEO offers for my page!)

Still it's a pity: I used to have a couple of really major placements on Google - so much that I've had some inquires if I'd like to sell my personal homepage (nah, I don't want to have to get a new email address!), offers by reputable and huge dating sites to put up ads on my page and surprisingly high offers for including my web page in link farms - but I'd have issues with that (I'd like to keep control of what my page contains; including content that might get Google to ban my page is scary), and it would have required me to run my page on PHP (ugh).

I wish there was an easy way to just keep the rankings I mysteriously had acquired the last years. :-) For some time it looked like I had some magic SEO capabilities, and friends suggested I should consider actually going into the SEO business. My page is still overrated by Google, but it seems like it has lost much of it's magic.

P.S. A fun story followup: I've just noticed that someone in a french cooking forum hotlinks to a photo of mine, claiming that he had cooked the food I did. Isn't that hilarious? Should I substitute that image with a g*atsee?