As you know, my website tries to help you as much as possible - especially when it comes to visitor mystery pottery mark queries.

I do this for free because it's fun and I'm an enthusiast.

Sometimes when I don't know a pottery mark, that's where you come in. We have had some fantastic 'assists' from visitors lately on some quite long-standing mystery marks.

Thank you!

I'll tell you about these in a later email, not on this one.

This email is about me apologising for length of time it's taking for me to get round to publishing the latest queries. Quite a few go back to last year.

Why the delay?

Sadly, our wonderful user generated content pages about pottery marks have been deemed by the new Google search update as 'thin content' because they do not contain enough words within them (apparently they need to be 400 or so words minimum).

As a result of this, not only have these specific (very useful) pages been de-indexed, but the whole site has been down-graded and I have lost over 1000 visitors per day.

OUCH!

Just because I was trying to help people for free :-(

If you don't fully understand this, neither do I, and I am an experienced webmaster.

So for the past few months I have been going through all 1526 pages and re-writing them one by one, beefing them up to 400+ words per page and sadly having to delete some.

(Remember, this website is not my job - it is something I do for fun. I am a ceramic sculptor by trade)

As a result, I have not been able to do your new queries for some time and have a backlog of 117 waiting. Thanks Google (for nothing!)

Sorry if this is one of yours, but I have nearly finished the giant re-write and will be onto the outstanding new queries soon!

Together, we are building a huge public record where my vision is to get to a situation where you can just Google the keywords for a mystery mark and get to my site with one click and solve your mystery. Already this happens to a large extent and we are still solving mystery marks everyday (despite the new Google efforts to trash us).

I have bought several new encyclopaedias and I am raring to go! Google's new policies will not beat me no matter how much I become a victim of their collateral damage ('false positives').

I just wish Google would get their act together and stop penalising top websites and concentrate on the multitude of webspam that's out there. Maybe the small guy trying to do good is an easier target than the black-hat-webspammer-techno-heads.

By the way, if you like what I do and want feel good about supporting me, think of 10 people who would like to buy see new figurine of Queen Elizabeth 11 as a beautiful young lady and ask them to pass this link (below) onto 10 others (let's go viral on my new fig!). This one will hold a high value in years to come (especially in the numbers under 100) - be like a first edition of a book. This is one way of protecting your money against the fluctuations in stocks & shares for sure.

Go here to look at the new figurine in clay (we haven't finished the colour sample yet, so you see my raw sculpting).

Here is the link:-

www.figurinecollect.com/the-diamond-queen.html

If this link does not work for any reason, please go to

www.figurinecollect.com/the-diamond-queen.html

Speak soon,

Peter Holland (Sculptor and Web Publisher) p.s. I always love to hear back from you, so press reply to give me a heads-up!

Other stuff:-