I created this site for fun, but it got very popular and I made a little money from it, but mostly I had fun hearing all the horror stories and helping people with all sort of poison ivy questions, which I still do, so all for free.

But years ago Google had this very site as the number one result for the search term “poison ivy”, and on busy summer days we would get 10,000 visitors.  Sometimes 100,000 if we published a blog post that hit a nerve.

We made a little money from Google ads, and sold a few items from our store. 

But over time Google changed their ad policy so that ads for what you have just searched for show up on every site you visit. So our ad revenue mostly went away.

Then Google made some problematic changes to how search works. They used try to find the website with the best info for your search, which is why we were #1 for years.

But Google changed the formula so that now very popular sites with many links to them rank on top, regardless of the quality of the information they give out.

If you follow the top links that Google gives you, most of them have one rather weak little page, none of which compares to the hundreds of pages we offer.

I hired a number of Search Engine experts and they all said that it is a problem that can not be solved (but also charged me.)

So I will keep the site going in spite of the fact that Google and all the other search engines almost don’t list it. Instead of 30,000 visitors a day I get about 300.

The site is worth keeping up; it helps people – if they can find it. Perhaps someday the search engine companies will return to providing useful results to people rather than purely maximizing profits. Perhaps.

If you happen to have a real insight on how this situation can be fixed, contact me.