Awhile back we allowed Google to crawl the SDMB, so our posts now show up on Google searches. Has this brought an appreciable amount of traffic to the SDMB? Are there more people viewing, or posting, now that google crawls our boards?
Basically, was allowing Google to index us worth it?
Mods and admins do not have access to this data. Ed/Jerry would be the ones able to answer this question.
-xash
Administrator
I thought the reason this was done was not for traffic, but to provide an alternative to the search option here?
Or both?
Worth what? This OP makes no sense.
Yes it does. You’re picking up on ‘worth’ as in ‘at what cost’, which is, of course, a correct interpretation, but I would have thought it’s obvious that what he meant is ‘was it worth *letting *Google index the boards?’ Which is pretty much what he said.
What are the benefits? What are the detriments?
Without doing that, any answer is as good as “fish”.
OP:
Dunno. Fish?
That still makes no sense. It doesn’t cost any money to have Google index the boards and the only thing TPTB gained by restricting Google’s spiders was to give the community a sense of privacy for their posts.
I’m very confused. The OP asked what we gained by letting Google index us - which I thought they were. You’re saying that TPTB ‘restricted’ (prevented?) that happening?
Yes. Initially TPTB restricted Google from crawling the boards by placing a small line of code on each page. Removing this code is a trivial procedure so TPTB had nothing to lose by taking it out. So there’s no question of whether it was “worth it” or not.
The only thing we users lost was the ability to keep our posts somewhat private from a Google search.
I don’t recall this change, but if TPTB wanted to prevent Google from indexing the board they only needed to remove the SDMB from this site’s robots.txt. (If you don’t know what robots.txt is, see Wikipedia here.)
You know, if you teach a man to fish, he’ll be able to index his own websites for the rest of his life.
I’m guessing it’s because fishing is so boring that you have nothing else to do.
The OP asked a valid question: originally TPTB elected to block google et al from indexing the board threads. At some point, they changed that decision and allowed google access, and stated reasons based on presumed benefits (right?). Did those presumed benefits come true?
But stating it as “was it worth it” phrases it as a trade off of some sort. Something was lost in order to gain the google indexing. That is why I asked for benefits and detriments. You can’t evaluate a worth comparison until you state what you gained and what you lost.
possible benefits:
possible detriments:
I think it is fairly easy to state that the detriments are minor (if existent at all). Almost any benefit is going to at a minimum make it a break even.
Given that many posters use google searches in place of board searches, that improved functionality for board users puts the decision in the positive column.
So was it worth it? My seat of the pants evaluation says yes. Of course, that doesn’t answer the original intent: did the board traffic increase because of google indexing?
There is definitely a cost to allowing Google (or any other search engage) index the board: the board must serve every page the search spider requests. That takes server resources and network bandwidth, both of which must be paid for.
I’d imagine some spammers and bots use google to find keywords in discussions relevant to their product.
And you occasionally get someone who obviously just googles around for discussion of their pet issue and then swoops in and cuts/pastes a boilerplate, thesis long post about the subject (the Armenian Genocide being a famous one, or at least used to be)
But I haven’t really noticed any uptick in those sorts of things. The mods are pretty good with disappearing spam though, so maybe its occurring and I just haven’t noticed.
According to Google, the SDMB had about 356,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days. That’s roughly triple the number a year ago. Page views haven’t gone up appreciably, though.
It’d be interesting to see how many new posters- who participate in forums besides The Game Room- have come aboard since Google Indexing was implemented, too. I personally haven’t noticed a huge number of new “regulars” recently, FWIW.