David Condon Finds

When I first started adding blog posts to my main business website, I honestly didn’t know what I was doing. I’m a woodturner and small business owner from Kerry, Ireland, not a professional writer, marketer, or SEO expert. My original goal was fairly simple: help my main website gain a bit more visibility on Google and answer a few common customer questions along the way. What started as the occasional blog post slowly turned into something much bigger. From Business Website to Blog Website Over time, I found myself writing not only about my own business, but also about the wider experience of trying to build a small website online. That included blogging, Google Search Console, SEO confusion, disappearing search traffic, AI summaries, website ads, online visibility, small business struggles, and the constant feeling that the internet was changing faster than I could keep up with it. Unfortunately, by adding these kinds of posts to my woodturning website, I was also diluting the focus...

The days just after Christmas have a strange kind of calm to them. The rush has passed, the chaos of the lead-up is over, and for a few days the whole country seems to slow down, or even stop, at the same time. Shops go quiet, inboxes settle, and even the dog seems to think it’s time to take it easy. For me, this week has always felt like a mini reset that arrives automatically every year, whether I plan it or not. It’s not quite the New Year, and not quite the old year, just an odd little gap where life pauses long enough for you to catch your breath. The Pace Finally Slows Down St. Stephen’s Day 26th December is the first day I notice the difference. There’s no pressure to be anywhere, no deliveries coming in, no customer queries waiting. No Christmas dinner to eat and no gifts to give out. Even my workshop feels different. The tools stay quiet, the lathe stays off, and I’m not rushing from one job to the next. The office PC isn’t whirring constantly under my desk, or groaning unde...

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote back in June 2025,  Why I’m Still Blogging – Even If Google’s New AI Might Bury My Posts . When I wrote that original piece, I was full of stubborn optimism. I knew Google’s AI Overviews might take clicks away from small websites, but I still believed there was value in genuine human writing. I believed real experience, personal opinion, and honest small-business stories still had a place online. A few months later, I still believe that. But I’ll be honest, it has not always been easy. The AI Overview Hangover Let’s be honest, AI Overview has hit small independent blogs like mine very hard. Even my main website David Condon Woodcraft is suffering a drop in traffic and that site is over 8 years old with significant google clout.  Affiliate earnings that once trickled in every month from my blog posts have almost completely dried up. My posts still get views, but far fewer than before, and conversions are practically non-existent. Many ...

Lately I’ve been asking myself a question I never thought I’d need to: is my blog content actually being stolen by bots? Search engines like Google and Bing have always crawled websites, and that’s normal. But when one of my new posts here was hit nearly 900 times in just 24 hours, it didn’t feel like ordinary indexing. It felt like something else and it left me wondering if something is taking my work, where it’s ending up, and whether I’ll ever even know.

You can spend years working at something you love but sometimes it takes explaining it to someone else to see it clearly for yourself. That’s something I learned twice: first when I started teaching woodturning, and then all over again when I started blogging about it. Who knew it could be so difficult and  yet so simple at the same time?

What Went Wrong With My WordPress Blog Setup (And Why I Went Back to Blogger) When I decided to upgrade my blog to a shiny new WordPress site, I expected a bit of a learning curve — but not a full-blown disaster. What was supposed to be a simple migration from Blogger turned into a frustrating mess of DNS issues, vanished menus, broken templates, and a lot of wasted time. In this post, I’ll share exactly what went wrong with no fluff, how it snowballed into a full retreat, and why I’m back on Blogger for now. If you’re thinking of switching platforms, this might save you a few headaches. Be sure to read my post  Is Amazon Prime Worth it? after you finish here! Plain speak only!

 What Happened to My Website Traffic? A few months ago — and seemingly overnight — I started noticing my website traffic slipping. Not just a slow day here and there, but an over-the-cliff drop in clicks and visits. The posts that once brought people in — especially my carefully written affiliate content — just weren’t pulling the same numbers anymore and very few were actually following my links. I went from a modest traffic level and some small commissions to nothing at all. If this frustration sounds familiar, I also wrote about the paid side of the same problem in  Why Google Ads Is So Hard for Small Businesses where I explain why “just run ads” isn’t the simple solution people think it is.

Why Isn’t Google Indexing Your New Blog? You’re Not Alone Have you set up a new blog recently? Are you struggling to figure out why Google hasn't crawled or indexed your new pages yet? You're not alone. I went through this same issue myself, and I decided to write this post to help and advise anyone else in the same boat. This post also applies to new website owners and has some helpful tips. Check out my other post  Blogging for Your Small Business: A Practical Guide  for tips and practical suggestions after you finish here!

Blogging in the Age of AI Overviews If you’ve used Google lately, you’ve probably noticed something different. Instead of clicking into websites, you’re getting answers straight from the search page thanks to AI Overview. Sounds handy, right? Maybe it is to the casual browser but for small creators like me, it’s a real kick in the teeth. Traffic has dropped to my website and new blog. Affiliate links don’t get seen and I have the Analytics to prove it. Product reviews and personal blog posts are being buried under summaries scraped from… well, blogs like mine.

Here’s what I learned when every URL on my new blog suddenly disappeared from Google Search overnight, and what I did to start fixing it. I woke up one morning, logged into Google Search Console, and saw the sort of thing that makes a new blogger’s stomach drop. Zero indexed pages. Not fewer pages. Not a small dip. Not a warning message I could calmly investigate. Zero. My new Blogger blog wasn’t even a week old. The day before, 11 of my posts had been indexed and were starting to show impressions. For a brief moment, it felt like Google had finally noticed the site. Then, overnight, everything vanished. No clear warning. No obvious explanation. Just a blog that had been visible one day and seemingly invisible the next. The only faint silver lining? GSC was now, for the first time, detecting all 26 URLs on my blog, even if none of them were indexed yet. That was one of my first real lessons as a new blogger: publishing a post and being visible on Google are two very different t...

Thinking of starting a blog for your small business? I’ve been there, and I nearly gave up before I even got going. Like many business owners, I kept hearing that blogging would help customers find me, improve my SEO, and bring more people to my website. It sounded great, but I resisted it for years. I’m not a writer, or so I believed. The idea of blogging was intriguing though, and deep down I knew there was value in it. I just didn’t think I was the right person to write anything worth reading. My old school teachers would probably have nodded in agreement. This story continues in my post Why I’m Still Blogging – A Few Months On , if you'd like to see how far along I went and the obstacles and hurdles I had to get around. My Difficult Start I think I wrote one or two awkward posts for my newly created website - early on in 2018 and that was it. I wasn’t impressed with my own writing at all. In fact, the last time I had written anything properly was in school in the 90s and it...