Popularity Jump ??

[schielrn]

Thanks for clearing that up Nate. I always for some reason always thought of bots in a negative fashion.

 

[starl]

We’ve been taking a look this fall at how to improve navigation at MrExcel. One area that has been frustrating is getting the content of the forum completely into Google. In the past, we had 12K pages from the old board at http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/index.html and 70K pages from the first years of the new board archived elsewhere. Google successfully added the 12K pages but was not reliably sending people into the archive2. This week, Smozgur came up with a way to replace the static HTML pages with redirects that come back into the real message board. This went live yesterday. So – now, when someone finds an answer at Google, they are getting to the real board page instead of the static archive. It is pretty wild to see that this nearly doubled the people at the board. I would guess most of these people will get their answer and then bounce back, but since they are arriving at the real forum now, they might hang around and become members of the community.<o></o>
<o> </o>
We’ll keep our eye on board responsiveness. It has been good this morning. If it starts causing problems, we can consider going back to a static archive.<o></o>

 

[Domski]

I always noticed in the past when Googling the odd query it always seemed to come up with archived posts but never really questioned why.

Have just done a couple of searches and while the archived results still displayed first the live board ones were directly behind.

Could get a tad busy round here!!!

Dom

 

[PaddyD]

"I would guess most of these people will get their answer and then bounce back, but since they are arriving at the real forum now, they might hang around and become members of the community."

Only anecdote at this stage but I'm seeing a substantial increase in first time posters...

 

[SydneyGeek]

Yeah, even on the Access forum which moves at a slower pace, things have picked up a bit.
Amazing what a smart redirect can do...

Denis

 

[starl]

fyi on the bots - Suat did some magic and has minimized the bots around here. So probably, the jump is more actual people than more bots - tho I'm sure we have some new bots.