Google is the bane of my existence. As soon as I think I have the algorithm figured out, some previously indexed pages drop off the list of indexed pages or a page that I spent hours coding by hand is intentionally skipped for indexing.

Throughout much of 2023, I noticed a couple things unique about my pages that get indexed and stay indexed. They are as follows:

• The pages lack date tags in the file name
• The pages contain Perennial Content (usually)

Perennial Content

Perennial Content is content that remains of perpetual interest for someone other than a history buff looking for online sources. Let's look at three KTracy.com articles as examples for how perennial they are:

BAD

Newt Gingrich Floats 2012 Presidential Run

Why would anyone today want to click on this link? Even if you were researching the 2012 Presidential Primary for a paper and knew nothing about who ran in the race, there is little appeal today. Newt Gingrich did eventually run for President, but the title alone indicates we don't know whether or not Newt will run for certain at the time of writing.

Instead, this article would be skipped and the potential reader is going to find something more relevant to some event in Newt Gingrich's campaign, including his announcement or decision to drop out of the race.

Content like this is pretty useless and it's unlikely that I'll even find a reason to link to this in my own blog posts in the future (this article excluded).

GOOD

Understanding the Appeal of Trump to Evangelicals

This is a lot better. As long as Donald Trump is in the news and conservative Evangelical Christians continue to shill for a man who made a former porn star the First Lady, uses the Bible as nothing more than a prop, and exhibits no obvious Christian virtue whatsoever; this article will be relevant and should stay indexed.

FOREVER CONTENT

Does The Russian Constitution Enable Corruption?

Like the previous article, this post from 2010 that compares the Russian Constitution to that of the United States is going to stay indexed for a while. However, someday, Donald Trump will be a distant memory and we'll be ungrateful for it, just as we are ungrateful for the passing of most of our problems. When that happens, the Russian Federation and the United States will still have constitutions worthy of direct comparison.

This content will be relevant for DECADES.

The Challenge With Perennial Content

There's just one problem with Perennial Content... I'm kind of a hot take blogger. The type of content I create now is almost and has usually almost always been extremely reactionary. This reactionary content makes extremely poor perennial content.

If I'm going to create Perennial Content, I can't just react to the news. In fact, I'm going to have to do a better job of scheduling my content. I've done this before when I was doing Comic Factoids back in 2019, and that content was extremely well received by both readers and the indexing algorithm over at Google.

Structural Changes

The biggest changes I have to make to create more perennial content involve the content itself. However, there are two other things I feel are important to address, and both deal with the web address.

Take a look at this URL from last year:

https://www.ktracy.com/news/2023/20231115-pro-hamas-protesters-paid.php

I don't know this for certain, but I suspect Google is able to parse date data from URLs and, it would stand to reason, the older content identifies itself as, the less likely it will be that the content will be indexed.

YYYY in the Filename

Additionally, as you can tell by the bold characters in the URL above, 12 characters are being used for the date. That's signaling very clearly to Google when the content was created AND that the date of the content is important enough to put in the URL. I'm going to start to change that now in 2024. For now, I'm keeping the /yyyy/ directory for all the articles posted for the year. However, I'm ditching the yyyy in the filename. The new format is just mmdd-title.php for the rest of the year.

If you go to the News Archives and scroll all the way to the bottom to the content I created when I was a Junior in High School decades ago, you'll notice something similar:

https://www.ktracy.com/news/2001/010412gas.php If you look at that file format, YYMMDD-title is used. The reason I started doing this was because from the very beginning, all KTracy.com news articles were kept in one common directory (either /news/ or the root directory). It was very important for me to organize the content for no other reason than to be able to easily find the most recent news articles in case I had to make minor changes to the HTML after seeing the page live.

(I foolishly don't test my code before uploading it to the FTP, I just throw it up and hope for the best... even to this day)

I don't need the YYYY in the filename anymore because...

We have a /YYYY/ Directory!

Now, we unfortunately NEED a year directory. I have archives dating back to 1999 sitting on my computers. That's 25 years of content. I also won't be surprised if I'm still creating content 25 years from now. Shoving 50+ years worth of HTML/PHP pages into one directory is going to cause some pretty significant server delays; which would be very problematic.

Going into this year, I actually considered changing the date from a 4 digit format to a 2 digit format. However, I'm not sure that's the right play because Google might be able to see through that. Instead, what I'll consider this year if a different format might make more sense. For example, BD, BE, BF could represent 24, 25, 26. Just some random letters to most, but it would be enough to break up the directories and be easy enough for me to read.

I'm not sure I want to make something that cryptic though. This is all to say that I decided to keep the /YYYY/ format in tact for one more year.