Search Engine Optimization

[bvanevery]

Does anyone around here know anything about the subject of SEO, specifically for purposes of making this website more visible and trafficked?

I have recently had a lot of thought about democracy, socialism, and the impacts of people's behavior upon the web.  Ranking algorithms nowadays are one of the basic Means Of Production.  I've even gone so far as to investigate the subject of distributed search engines, to wrest this power away from the likes of Google, Bing, Baidu, and Yandex.  These are apparently the only 4 major search indices out there.  Unfortunately the idea of distributed search, of democratizing these "utilities", is not new and not easy.  Many failed projects littering the internet since the early 2000s, and surviving efforts don't have any substantial uptake.

Against all this fun political thought, the last time I actually cracked someone's tutorial about SEO, I was almost immediately put to sleep.     There's a reason I've been ignoring web programming for 3 decades.  But as an indie game developer I'm realizing it's a stage I'm going to have to go through, to control my own destiny.  Have to figure out how I'd get a game sold, and my only "product" right now is my mod on this site.

[bvanevery]

Today I am focusing effort on what Simple Machines Forum provides for SEO.

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.0:Features_and_Options

Meta keywords associated with forum - These keywords are sent in the output of every page to indicate to search engines the key content of your site. There should be a comma separating each word in the list, and HTML or BBCode should not be used. (Example of meta keywords and how they should be placed: forum, discussion, free, fun, social).

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.0:Search_engines

From this area you can decide in how much detail you wish to track search engines as they index your forum, as well as review search engine logs.

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.0:Logs#Spider_Log

In the Spider Log page ("Administration Center > Members > Search engines > Spider Log or Administration Center > Maintenance > Logs > Spider Log), logs of page views made by spiders browsing the forum are available. Depending on the Search Engine Tracking Level setting selected on the Settings page, this page can vary from showing the action of the spider, or not showing the action at all. If the tracking setting is set to Disabled or Standard, spiders will not be logged on this page.

[bvanevery]

Ok, I just did a very crude test of whether my numerous After Action Reports have any surfacing on the internet at all.  I am sure there are more sophisticated SEO testing tools I can use, and more detailed search terms I could type.  But I just tried typing "SMAC AAR" into DuckDuckGo to see what would come up.

Imagine my surprise when the leading article is from something over at Paradox gaming forum.  The stupid Stellaris game has someone's Gaia's Stepdaughter's faction in it.  It is of course done as a direct tribute to SMAC, with notes about SMAC on the page.  And this damn thing is blocking out actual SMAC!!!

Obviously, because Paradox's forum is way, way, way more important / trafficked than this one is.  I don't know how deep the extent of this goes, but it's important to fight back about this sort of thing.

I somehow don't feel bad about the 2nd hit being the Association of American Railroads.  Sufficiently nerdy.

3rd hit http://dos486.com/alpha/morgan/ has something appropriate about Morgan Industries.

4th hit is Smash Karts, wth?

5th is AAR: Varshavianka- The People's War.  That's the only "above the fold" hit from this site.  It's from 2013, is stickied, and has 57k views.  That's on the order of 10x more views than my most popular, highest production values, and fairly recent AARs.  I have the misfortune of having produced all my content when this site's membership was on the wane.  If I had written exactly the same things in this site's golden age, I'm sure I'd have equal viewership.  Intervening years not withstanding.

6th is something goofy and irrelevant.  7th is that Paradox knockoff showing up again.  By principle of imitation, definitely need to analyze what Paradox is doing SEO-wise, other than just being a big company with money and lots of users.  8th and 9th are stupid things, and that's the show.

Clicked on [More Results] and saw that AAR: The Spartan Federation - Will To Power is 10th.  Doesn't have as many views on this site as my own AARs, so I wonder if it has better external linkage on the internet.  Threw that title into DuckDuckGo and didn't get anything off of this site, no "backlinks", so I don't know what the difference is.

[bvanevery]

Better luck searching for "alpha centauri after action report".  My most recent AAR, The Tree Hugger, is the 4th listing.

Surprisingly, a very old AAR of mine is 6th, but it's my link to it on CivFanatics that got ranked.  This indicates I could improve the rankings of my AARs, by shilling them on all the other SMAC forums, such as they are.  I do/did have accounts in those various places, but it got really tedious making all those announces for such a small audience gain.  The irony of now being willing to do it, years later, for search indexing!

I've mentioned The Clean Death Of Us All a number of times on r/4Xgaming and got ranked 7th for that.  The Tree Hugger link on Reddit is also ranked 8th.

A link to my mod on GOG is ranked 9th, so maybe I should start announcing there again.  Got very bored with that because nobody ever replied.

[bvanevery]

Surprisingly, a very old AAR of mine is 6th, but it's my link to it on CivFanatics that got ranked.  This indicates I could improve the rankings of my AARs, by shilling them on all the other SMAC forums, such as they are.

Now I am not so sure.  That link was marked "nofollow", and I'm learning that's a common practice on social media and perhaps also various forum softwares.  For instance, I'm finding my Reddit links are marked "nofollow". 

A link to my mod on GOG is ranked 9th, so maybe I should start announcing there again.

Also marked "nofollow".

Google recently changed how it processes nofollow, regarding it as a hint rather than an ironclad directive.  But I think it kinda sucks that if I want to release web content via the medium of forum posts, everything is biased against allowing me to have visibility and surfacing.  I'm starting to understand why people blog, which coming from a Usenet background, I always thought was stupid.  Listening to someone drone on and on with very little input / feedback / debate.  But in terms of SEO and becoming an authority on a topic, it makes sense.  I should be an authority by now, about SMAC, with all the work and content I've done over several years.  But it might be due to the anti-forum bias, I'm not.

https://backlinko.com/nofollow-link indicates that nofollow links may actually get followed.  It's not clear when / why.  I guess the web is built out of BS.

[michalenkolorri]

Why would you need to huck someone else's SEO tutorial? Of course, you got bored because you hacked and discovered someone else's source of information. Although I still think that SEO is a very interesting type of marketing. It allows you to optimize the search engine and raise a particular site higher in search in browsers. I'd used local seo central coast several times because my fishing tackle store wasn't the most popular in town, even though it was close to the coast. And buying the SEO service was a great boost to my customer base. Over time, I had so many customers that I thought about expanding my business. So don't underestimate the tutorial you found.

[bvanevery]

I don't understand what you're saying.  What do you mean?

[Vidsek]

@michalenkolorri You may have misunderstood:  Bvanevery meant he read ("cracked open") the tutorial, not that he "hacked" it.