Although I haven’t been on any new bike trails recently, I just had to get out and enjoy the fall colors on some of the more wooded bike trails that I knew about and had already ridden and to get some autumn bike trail photos for this site.

We are pretty close to peak fall color season here in the Chicagoland area ~ I’m not sure if we are a little past the peak or if it is going to get even better but it was definitely nice enough for some beautiful trail rides.

I had quite a few choices for wooded trails and I initially chose The Des Plaines River Trail (near Euclid / Lake Street) and the North Branch Trail (south of Lake Street). My other runner-ups were Busse Woods,  Millennium Trail (south end) , the Moraine Hills trails and the Fox River Trail. I’m sure there are others too but there is only so much time for trail riding (even in peak fall color season)! 🙂

Most of the time when I ride a new bike trail ~ or parts of a trail that I had not been on ~ and bring my camera my goal is to photograph and document as much of the trail as I can (and try to get get quality photos).

My goal for the bike trail photos that I just took was to capture the fall colors and maybe even get some creative shots. So these photos do not cover a specific route as much as just give you the feel of riding these trails in the fall. It’s all about the colors!

The photo on the right is one of my more creative fall color photos. This one is one of the mushroom photos in the Des Plaines River Trail photo pages (you’ll know what that means if you check out the photo pages).

So without further yaking here are the new Fall Color Bike Trail Photo Pages: See the Des Plaines River Trail Fall Photos here (3 pages) and see the North Branch Trail Fall Photos here (2 pages).

A little bad news for me and other small businesses on the Internet…

It was really nice to be able to get out and enjoy some scenic fall bike rides and I needed that after the bashing that my websites (including about-bicycles.com) took from Google recently.

Google does updates quite often to try to improve their search results. A lot of the time they succeed and their search results improve. Other times they get worse.

The about-bicycles.com bike site took a big hit with the last round of Google updates and the traffic to this site has dropped significantly. We used to get over 3,000 visitors per day in peak cycling season. It is much less now but fortunately we still show up in the search results fairly well (unlike some other small businesses that were basically ruined by this update).

Google used to state that they supported small businesses and individual website owners but it appears that they are now favoring big business. Just check out the search results and see how many times you only get the largest internet sites and little if any smaller sites (often low quality too).

OK, sorry about rambling on about this but I do have a reason for mentioning it here.

If you like any of the pages on this website, like the new fall photo pages that I just posted, please “Like”, “Tweet” or use one of the other social media buttons at the bottom of each webpage on this website. This will not fix all of the damage that the Google update did to this website but it will help a little and every little bit helps.

At least a lot of our pages that got dropped still show up on Bing and Yahoo! (just an FYI if you want to help break Googles Big Business Monopoly) :-).