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Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:37 am Post subject: Forum is locked for migration [ Now unlocked - All done! ]
Hello all,
I will be handing over the forum to Dave soon, so I am locking the forum to make it read only.
This is being done so no new posts or changes are lost after the database has been dumped and moved.
The forum should only be locked for a few days until Dave gets it up and running on his site. Thanks.
Greg Fowler _________________ Rock on!
Last edited by xgregx on Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:39 am; edited 1 time in total
Joined: Oct 03, 2005 Posts: 1595 Location: Marshall, MI
Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:12 am Post subject: Forum
OK. Here we go. I will be helping from strictly the forum side of things. Postings, categories, etc. It is difficult to find this forum right now but we will smooth out the path real soon.
Joined: Oct 11, 2005 Posts: 513 Location: San Diego CA
Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 6:45 pm Post subject: Re: Forum
Steve Searles wrote:
It is difficult to find this forum right now but we will smooth out the path real soon.
That’s sort of a high priority item for me. We don’t have any presence in the search engines. Lets face it you cant build a forum if people cant find it. I'm already working on turning that around.
One of the reasons I chose "Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Owners Group" for a name (other than the fact that it makes sense) is because it should be very search engine friendly and is chock full of key words that we need to target in the search engines.
I have also put in a keyword rich description for the site and put in what are known as meta tags. Those are lists of key words for the search engines. The jury is out on whether meta tags do any good these days but what the heck it cant hurt.
Today I "Google tapped" the site. I'm not sure how familiar you are with how search engines operate but search engines like Google send what are known as spiders out on the net and what they do is "crawl" websites and report back everything they find to mother Google. Meanwhile back at mother Google they index all the information that the spiders send home and that’s where the results come from when you do a search.
The problem with forums though is that search spiders hate them. If you pass your mouse over a link in most forums what you will see are really weird URL's with long strings of numbers and symbols. When a spider hits one of those links they either wont or have a hard time following them, which is sort of like shutting the door on the search engines.
What Google tapping does is translate those weird links into nice happy simple links like forums.html and the search spiders love them.
So we are pretty well locked and loaded now for the search engines and just have to wait to get indexed. This could happen right away or it could take up to a few months. It’s hard to say because Google is pretty hush hush about the way they do things.
Generally the way it works is they have spiders out there most all the time but those just do mini crawls and don’t drill too deep into a site. But about once a month (hard to say) Google sends out the deep crawlers that will really drill into the site. That's the ones we are waiting for to come by. Then later on at some unannounced time. Google will do what is called "The Dance" and that’s when their servers get updated with the new information. Nobody knows when the "dance" will happen because Google is so secretive about it.
It's sort of a slow process but it eventually does happen. Some admins turn into total Google junkies watching this stuff but I don’t really worry about it. I know things will eventually kick in. Besides it’s not like anyone has any control over it anyway.
Once I can get the site a little more polished and ready for prime time I want to start actively looking for link partners. Those are important because every link that gets put in is like a vote for the site and affects the search engine rankings.
Anyway that's pretty much the scoop on where we are now. It will take a bit of time but we will for sure have a search engine presence out there. Its an agonizingly slow process but proven.
Joined: Oct 11, 2005 Posts: 513 Location: San Diego CA
Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 6:46 pm Post subject:
Here’s the latest on site happenings. Most of the site reconstruction is over with at this point. It might not be a bad idea to refresh your browsers or delete temporary Internet files or things could look a little goofy. One other thing you might want to do is to tell your browser or popup blockers to allow popups on this site otherwise your popup blocker will block PM notifications and Instant Messages.
I put in a number of very cool things around the site and in the forums themselves so I encourage people to explore. For instance the editor used for posting messages in the forums has been modified to a full-blown WYSIWYG editor with spellcheck. You can also do a bunch of other things like post videos, pictures or just about anything else you can think of throwing at it.
Next on the “todo” list is to clean up the forum categories. The current categories are poorly laid out and are about as interesting as a quarterly finance meeting at work .
Joined: Oct 11, 2005 Posts: 513 Location: San Diego CA
Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 11:58 am Post subject:
Glad you like what you are seeing so far. Ill probably start fixing up those categories today. There was some question at first as to whether we should leave the categories alone for now and ease into things or just take the big bang approach and get it over with. Everyone I have talked to wants to take the big bang approach so I guess I have my marching orders.
The categories will be sort of a loose framework at first so if you have ideas on how to improve them I am open to suggestions.
Joined: Oct 11, 2005 Posts: 513 Location: San Diego CA
Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 7:51 pm Post subject:
Yea they are, it takes a lot of work to get top listings. Especially for new startup sites. One thing that would help out a lot would be incoming links from other sites. Google treats those links like votes for the site. So anywhere we can ask people to put in a link for us it’s worth asking.
Google puts so much emphasis on those that I have literally seen sites taken completely offline but they still show as #1 up to a year later. Only because they have so many links pointing to them _________________ 78 Honda GL1000
79 Honda CBX Turbo
82 Yamaha Seca 650 Turbo
84 Kawasaki ZX750 Turbo
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