I was just out on the Orange Trail in Deer Grove yesterday and wanted to post an update on the condition of the trail since there were some downed trees. The Orange Trail is the old abandoned forest preserve road that they closed to automotive traffic. I actually remember many years ago when you could drive on what they now call a trail but that was quite a while ago. You get on this trail from the entrance off Dundee Road just east of Northwest Highway.
The first tree over the Orange Trail
The Orange Trail is not very long (a little over a mile one way) but it is one of my favorite trails in Deer Grove and can be used to get from one trail (or road) to another. I walked the trail yesterday since I have been unable to ride so far this season due to an injury (my physical terrorist 🙂 has now given me permission to start riding short distances again so I should be back in the saddle again for this season soon).
Anyway, what I discovered yesterday is that there are 2 huge trees that have fallen on to the trail and I don’t believe that you can ride around them on a bike without stopping and either walking around or under them. The trail was also under water on one side in one of the ravines but you could still get by easily on the other side. The trees that were on the trail look like they fell over due to all the rain and flooding and the wet ground since you could see how their roots came out of the ground.
The high water over some of the trail
They maintain the trails in Deer Grove pretty well (it’s a Cook County forest preserve) so I imagine that they will get out there and get these trees off the trail eventually but I don’t know how long it’s going to take them to get to it. So you just need to know that if you ride on this trail there are some obstructions that you’ll need to get around.
We have had a lot of flooding in the Chicago area this week so I was worried about flooding on the trails. This trail in Deer Grove was not bad but I know there has been flooding along the Fox River and the Des Plaines River so I’m sure parts of those bike trails are flooded too.
The second fallen tree on the Orange Trail
The river does not have to be that high to flood the underpasses on the Des Plaines River Trail. I’ve seen that happen before as in the photos on this page.
About-Bicycles Updates
Sorry about the long time between posts here, I am usually much more active with this blog. Although we have not had the greatest riding weather recently, we have had a few good riding days but as I mentioned above I have had an injury that has prevented me from riding so far this season.
The main reason though that I have not been on schedule with my blog updates and have fallen a little behind on a few other updates to the site is because I am still trying to recover from the last Google Bashings that this site has had.
I have mentioned this before in some of my other posts but if you missed it we lost a large amount of traffic to this site with the recent Panda and Penguin updates from Google. We still rank higher in the Search Engine Results for Bing and in a lot of cases I have found the Bing results to be more relevant.
It seems to me that Google is ranking the popular super-sites on the internet higher on most search terms regardless of how relevant the specific results are. For example, you always see Wikipedia, You Tube, Amazon, TrailLink (for bike trails), Flickr (for photos), etc. even when they don’t match the specific term that you are searching for. Plus often you get multiple (like 10 or more) search results for the same website (let’s have some variety!).
OK, I could ramble on a lot more about Google’s degraded search results but I need to get back to the topic that I was originally discussing.
One of the penalties that you get with the Google Panda update has to do with “Thin Content” and I think there is a possibility that my bike trail photo pages may have inadvertently caused me problems in this area.
The bike trail photo pages on this site were designed simply to showcase the bike trail photos with very brief captions on most of the photos. Well, I discovered that we have about 250 photo pages on this site and most have very little content because they were designed that way.
No one really knows what the exact Google algorithm is for their search results (except for the people at Google) but I have read that pages with less than 300 words as content could get penalized by Google and if there are a large number of these on your site it could cause problems. Well I have a very large number of photo pages with very little content other than very brief captions.
So anyway, one of the main things that I have been working on is increasing the content on these pages so I am backtracking and adding much more commentary to all the bike trail photo pages and this has been slow and time consuming.
In some cases the additional content just looks like “fluff” but I have discovered that adding more verbiage does actually add more depth the the photos and articles and can be helpful too in many situations.
Well, I knew that this topic was going to be hard to explain and I’m afraid that this part of the post got longer than I intended.
For those of you who made it this far and were interested, I hope that this explains why there hasn’t been many blog posts recently and that I am still working hard to recover from the latest Google bashings so I can continue with more relevant and quality updates to this website.