JavaRanch stewardship and SEO

[paul wheaton]

That is cool.

I put in a period of time about two months ago to compare with. I learned that we had a 19,500% increase in views for "2002 heisman candidates" It turns out that it was discussed in MD.

I tried to find the big drops, but everything is pretty long-tail-esque. And there were a lot of big gains too.

I tried to find a big drop. I found one that was 62% for "scjp 1.6 syllabus". In the previous period we had 318 and now we had 121. According to scroogle, we come up #15.

The title for our page is: "Change in SCJP 1.6 syllabus (Programmer Certification (SCJP) forum ..." and the url is www.coderanch.com/t/489576/java-programmer-SCJP/certification/Change-SCJP-syllabus

#1 is javabeat.com - SCJP 1.5 Syllabus Objectives (pagerank for page: 0; pagerank for home: 3)
#2 is javabeat.com - SCJP 1.4 or SCJP 1.5 - Difference

#10 stackoverflow

#14 is sun

And there are some illegal and pirate sites ahead of us too.

So, I'm guessing that after looking at that report we should try to figure out to help out this thread in such a way that it would simultaneously help all of our threads?

[kev grant]

are you seeing a drop in the total number of kws over the period?

[paul wheaton]

574,000 for the most recent 30 days. 614,000 for a 30 day slice in march.

So, yes! What's up with that?

[kev grant]

it looks like youre one of these large longtail sites that aren't benefiting from the latest Google algo changes.

forums have been affected more than most sites, not really sure why.

maybe a read through this (extremely long and permanently ongoing) thread might give you some clues?

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4125460.htm

i havent really been paying that much attention lately to be honest as most of our main sites (and all of the important ones) have improved more than theyve lost since the changes.

[paul wheaton]

FWIW: In march we had a monday with 67,000 visitors from google. yesterday we had 40,000.

Following your link now.

[paul wheaton]

I made it through the first three pages. If I keep reading will I learn how to mend things?

[kev grant]

lol.

no I doubt it. we'd have to know what it was to fix first wouldnt we? it could be so many aspects of the structure or algo changes that we can never know, from inbound links being counted differently to age / trust /brand tweaks its pointless trying to speculate really.

i pointed you to the thread to show you that:

a) you are not alone
b) its more than likely nothing you guys have done
c) its pointless speculating
d) so you know im not making it all up

longtail traffic is mainly affected by inner pagerank and your supplemental index ratio / performance, the more pages are in the main index (and hence can rank) the higher the deep traffic count.

the link sculpting we were discussing previously would likely help in this regard anyway, (unless youre removing important links)

[paul wheaton]

So, we should go about our business and wait and see. Yes?

[paul wheaton]

Update.

We've done a lot in this space. I'm holding off a bit to see if it make a difference.

We have 500,000 threads and for folks that are not logged in, we've trimmed a lot of links off of that page. So we should get a little more SEO focus?

For "Java" we seem to be hovering around #22, but once in a long while I'll see us jump up to #19.

As for overall traffic, last week we had traffic that was better than the previous four weeks. I had hopes that this week would be better still. Monday was by a hair, but tuesday and wednesday were slightly lower than last week.

If forums are still nose diving and we got a bump, that means we are doing awesome! If, however, all forums got a bump, then that means that our SEO efforts didn't really do anything.

[paul wheaton]

We are now hovering around #16, but one time I did see us jump up to #14 via scroogle.

And a few times via another browser I did see us on google at #6.