Bots and Bloggers Don’t Get Holiday Time Off.

In my opinion “pro” blogging is a little like running your own business, or being a sole proprietor. And when it comes to taking holidays the (grim) reality is things are going to slow down at your place of business for the duration. After all they don’t call them holidays for nothing.

My access to the net has been restricted for the last week or so, and some of you may have noticed the Wordpress timestamp feature has been keeping disassociated ticking over during my absence.

But then again I’ve only been ducking away for a few days at a time, and I’ve had time to timestamp a couple of “lite” posts in between. If my absences were longer, weeks rather than days for instance, then there’d certainly be far more posting gaps than there are at the moment.

And that would be OK with for me for a couple of reasons.

One, disassociated isn’t exactly a pro sort of blog to start with, and two, if I’m on holiday, and taking time off, that’s exactly what I am doing. While the average small business owner can’t take quite as much time off as those on a salary, it doesn’t mean they aren’t entitled to some sort of break.

The only difference, possibly, is that sole proprietors need to spend a little more time planning their holiday. A recent post at Blogging Fingers however seems to suggest holidays aren’t a good idea.

During the holidays, many people will have family over or have other commitments that need to come before blogging. You may even find yourself in a situation where you are unable to write a post on your blog for a few days.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. In my opinion anyway.

Never put your blog into this position. Unfortunately, you have chosen to run a blog and your blog never closes for the holidays. Your responsibility as an author is to assure that new content is being written to it on a timely manor.

I don’t entirely agree with this though, even as a non pro blogger. Apparently failure to keep your blog up to date will play havoc with the various search engines bots, or crawlers, which could lead to all sorts of search engine ranking problems.

What’s a blogger supposed to do? Work 24/7/365?

Bots don’t need time off, they don’t need time to sleep or eat, or spend time with their family or friends. Bots are just bots, and unlike people, they can operate indefinitely without pause.

That is all assuming that you focus on getting your content indexed quickly in the search engines.

I can understand some people see the importance in this sort of an end, but what’s the ultimate cost? Burnout? Let’s keep some perspective here.

Take some time off, you probably deserve it, and don’t mind the resultant posting gaps. As for the bots, let them look after themselves, I’m sure they will return once they realise you’re back on deck.