Why is this forum now hidden away ?

[tacnet]

Went to open https://www.sponsorchat.com for the first time in ages and see what people are talking about

But then i had to navigate through 3 pages just to get to the forum

That cant be doing this site any favours

[gotonudecom]

Went to open https://www.sponsorchat.com for the first time in ages and see what people are talking about

But then i had to navigate through 3 pages just to get to the forum

That cant be doing this site any favours

LOL!

Did you navigate the three pages? Then obviously it is fine.

How many sites do you manage?

What kinda income do you generate from these sites?

What visitor tracking software do you use?

[tacnet]

Went to open https://www.sponsorchat.com for the first time in ages and see what people are talking about

But then i had to navigate through 3 pages just to get to the forum

That cant be doing this site any favours

LOL!

Did you navigate the three pages? Then obviously it is fine.

How many sites do you manage?

What kinda income do you generate from these sites?

What visitor tracking software do you use?

Not sure what that has to do with anything ? Safe to say we've been in this business for 20 years and we are a fully VAT registered company

[DonMK]

I see it but now there is this index page you have to click to get here.

[LuKenGas]

What is VAT some kind of age verification system?

[gotonudecom]

Not sure what that has to do with anything ? Safe to say we've been in this business for 20 years and we are a fully VAT registered company
[/quote]


Not sure what your tax status has to do with anything? Almost anyone can register VAT!

You say WE, If I added up all the years my team has it would be in the hundreds of years. Still not relevant to my questions.
I have been doing Internet business myself for 25 years. I have been online since 1993. I started my first business when I was 13 and it was very successful.

I understand testing and statistics and also have been using forums since they were dial in bulletin boards.

Managing the improvement of websites is my bailiwick!


Could be that thebutcher is attempting to make some money from the site and this is his attempt?

I can tell that you did little to zero research before your post.

You can get to the forum with two clicks. Yes, I see how you took three.
The point is you could have done it in two, but you did not notice.
Unless you count clicking "ADULT BUSINESS CHAT" then it is three or four clicks to get to an actual thread.

Thebutcher is still working on the process.
Like facebook, you are not his customers, the advertisers are. You are his product!
His advertisers need and want more banner views.
People, other than you (maybe) want more options to find content.

If you do not manage many sites, then you would not have the experience, yourself to understand/comprehend what is going on!
If you have not generate a lot of income, say in the millions, then you do not have the experience to read above statement!

If you do not monitor site statistics, then you would not have, I think you are getting the point.

The only way to know if what he is doing is working, would be to read/review, assimilate, analyze, compile etc the site statistics, then interpret, then make a conclusion after you cogitate the full measure/scope of the data on how it might have affected his goals.

The effect of the changes could be doing exactly what he wants them to do.
Without the skills and experience needed, you would think the forum was hidden away! (it might be, I am awaiting the stats to make a decision.)

Without a statistical model and sample data then it is just your opinion!

[tacnet]

Your missing the point.

Im not critisizing thebutchers webmaster skills, i think hes actually done a good job with this site

Im saying that before, when the index page was the forum index page (ie this ), that meant that all your topic links were only 2 clicks away from the index (one click to select the forum and one click to the topic). This would put them resonably high in your google page ranks. Pages linked from your index would rank highest and the deeper you go, the lower importance google attaches to each page

By moving the forum 2 or 3 clicks further in, you have immediately demoted all those topic links as far as google is concerned. And the topics are where all your keywords will get posted

All I am saying is that from a purely SEO standpoint, it isnt doing this site any favours and is likely to have a negative impact

VAT is British Value Added Tax. Companies over a certain size in the UK have to register for it and pay 20% tax

[TheButcher]

Here is the logic in the index maybe not the right decision but giving it a shot.

1. To make the initial page a sort of hub for my remaining sites.
2. Redirecting all my unused domains to the root of sponsorchat, that way splitting off the visitors by hopefully what they want, I have a lot of domains that were for example cams, sex stores, dating, directories, toplists, blogs....that I see no point in keeping any more, but let's say a surfer comes from one of the cam sites now redirected to sponsorchat.com looking for cams can now just click on the cam sites listed there.
3. split off surfers and webmasters, if all the domains went to sponsorchat.com and that was the forum the surfer traffic would be wasted and any who did register to the forum would not make any contribution to the business chat.

It's just an idea but running sites not making a buck a month is just a waste of time, less sites means more time to work on the active ones and hopefully make the same or more money.

That's it to be honest.

[HeidiHoe]

Here is the logic in the index maybe not the right decision but giving it a shot.

1. To make the initial page a sort of hub for my remaining sites.
2. Redirecting all my unused domains to the root of sponsorchat, that way splitting off the visitors by hopefully what they want, I have a lot of domains that were for example cams, sex stores, dating, directories, toplists, blogs....that I see no point in keeping any more, but let's say a surfer comes from one of the cam sites now redirected to sponsorchat.com looking for cams can now just click on the cam sites listed there.
3. split off surfers and webmasters, if all the domains went to sponsorchat.com and that was the forum the surfer traffic would be wasted and any who did register to the forum would not make any contribution to the business chat.

It's just an idea but running sites not making a buck a month is just a waste of time, less sites means more time to work on the active ones and hopefully make the same or more money.

That's it to be honest.

Why not create a landing page (or several) for your redirected traffic on the SC domain instead?

[TheButcher]

Why not create a landing page (or several) for your redirected traffic on the SC domain instead?

I could do or just redo the existing index page to make it simpler, just out of curiosity how inconvenient is this existing setup.

[unicams]

Is it better for seo having that page?

[tacnet]

Yep I see what you are trying to achieve and youve got the right idea. Putting all your eggs in one basket can be a good thing when it comes to SEO. We do the same on https://www.tacamateurs.com/ where all the girls are part of the one domain rather than trying to manage 300 different domain names

But your better off creating a seperate landing page for your re-directed traffic. You could make it a subdomain eg sites.sponsorchat.com.

Your topics are where people are talking about whats going on in the world so they are likely to be keyword rich and relevant to what people are searching. Its best to keep these links as near to the index as possible so google will rank them higher

Im not sure what software you are using but if you can, you should also implement SEO links as this will make a HUGE difference to how google reads your site. So instead of the link to this topic being https://www.sponsorchat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=74&t=5623 (little or no google rank) it would be something like https://www.sponsorchat.com/forum/5623-why-is-this-forum-hidden-away.htm (much more google friendly)

Keywords in urls are ranked highest of all and its very easy to do. Just a couple of lines of code in your htaccess file

[TheButcher]

@tacnet that mod is available for vbulletin but not found one for phpBB the forum script here. I'll work on the suggestion here, appreciate them.

[TheButcher]

Is it better for seo having that page?

Not too sure to be honest

[tacnet]

Is it better for seo having that page?

Not too sure to be honest

No its worse. Forums like this are great for generating keyword rich content but by moving the forums further away from the index, google attaches less importance to the forum topics. Generally, the deeper the link the less importance google attaches to it.


I would be amazed if there wasnt a mod available for phpBB to make the links seo optimized. It really is just a couple of lines of code in your PHP and a few tweaks to your htaccess and your away. And it really does make a HUGE difference