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McDar is down for Maintenance

It is strange how dependent one can become on a regular source of information and it is hard to be patient but then again it is free, so I guess that you get what you pay for and we should just be grateful for their kind efforts.

McDar has been down for a few days now and so we have been unable to track the most recent progress of Big Daddy and we are still not sure what the overall impact will be for us even though it has rolled out to most data centers now. Rankpulse is showing exceptionally low levels of activity or flux, as it is often known, for all but one of the last six days.

Our overall visitor numbers are drifting very slowly downwards but we can't see any underlying trend. The spread of key words which our visitors use is so broad it is very hard to pick out what is going on in these circumstances even with he power of Google Analytics.

There are some straws in the wind which suggest that it might turn out OK. Certainly we are getting good coverage but there are a disturbing number of "composer mp3" search terms which are are being answered with a streaming sample page rather than the relevant descriptive page and I doubt whether that is working in our favor.

However it does strengthen the case for updating and enhancing the streaming sample pages so we had better get on with just that...

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