What do you want to see on AFN going forward?

[WildBill]

Maybe a dedicated area for "organic recipes" or "soil recipes" if you will.. For those of us interested in building our own soil but don't know where to start or how much of this or that to add. I'd love to learn from anyone willing to share recipes that work. Having that all in one area would be nice.

Now that's an endless huge topic!

 

[Son of Hobbes]

How about better coverage/inclusion of AFN in Google and other search engines?

Search results from AFN on grow-related topics used to be much more common. I don't remember any showing in recent searches. Maybe your search engine instructions file or other Web site search engine settings could use some adjustment? Or has AFN been tagged by Google, etc. as too cannabis-related, not suitable for pubic access, or what?

The site has been submitted to all the major search engines numerous times.

When we did the changeover from .net to .org, unfortunately Ryan, who owns the actual autoflower.net domain (he doesn't own the data though, which is why we're all still talking,) refused to allow us to forward some rather important information that would have helped the search engines continue to crawl the information already here.

Not solely because of that, but in part because of that, much of the forum wasn't -still- indexed by Google on the changeover. So when we resubmitted the site to everything, when it crawled the site it didn't look at any of the old dead threads, it really focused on a lot of the newer created content.

I've been researching more from other forum owners that run the same software that we do, and certain forum types (like our Live Stoner Chat subforum for example) hold virtually zero weight when it comes to Google crawling the information as "useful." Same with introduction type threads. So we've been setting "no index" tags on certain things that honestly don't need to be crawled by the search engines, in hopes that we see actual more relevant content get indexed.

I am not an SEO master by any means, but I can read and this is what I've gathered so far

I am open to suggestions if anyone here has them to look into, study up on, or otherwise consider.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

We worked really hard to truncate down and make the forum index shorter; I am going to be very hesitant for us to create any new subforums when we just chopped 2/3rds of them down. So if it's possible for us to make use of the space and threads we have, that's our preferred method going forward.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

How not just us, but ANYONE structure their posts, effects how it's crawled by Google. Maybe we work on a tutorial for "how to create a thread that is more likely to be picked up by search engines" kind of thing.

There are formatting options (titles, headings) that effect the weight of the threads in terms of searching, having a clear defined thread title, having a main image in the first post that is relevant to the topic, etc.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

See the little set of tags? If we edit these in, or require these to be added to new post content, that alone would help increase the searchability for Google.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

@420Forever ... opinion.... you still use live messaging don't you......?

Before @420Forever freaks out (I can already hear your response without this clarification lol,) that was a mention of "there is other Live Chat software that does the same thing as what we have now, but may be more feature robust." I like our IM Chat (remember, I'm the reason we have it?) But it's a basic bitch software, it does the bare minimum.

We tried ArrowChat very, very briefly on a demo years back, and that had audio and video messaging capabilities (I remember doing the first group video with it with Live Stoner members, everyone was freaked out because no one was legal and we all just saw each others faces!)

But we also know newer, bigger, fancier, doesn't always equate into BETTER.

 

[Mossy]

I am open to suggestions if anyone here has them to look into, study up on, or otherwise consider.

Before you throw all sorts of tech at us....Remember......you might be the Vic...vi...Volunteer doing it......so Please no pages of Theory.....Practical Help Needed..............

We worked really hard to truncate down and make the forum index shorter; I am going to be very hesitant for us to create any new subforums when we just chopped 2/3rds of them down. So if it's possible for us to make use of the space and threads we have, that's our preferred method going forward.

We went through a stage of letting every Topic having it's own Section..........it was a Mistake.....coz over 50% of them never got any Traffic......and it made the main forum page Massive and Complicated for new users....

So...we cut it back....with some sections Only Listing Active threads/sections.......if no-one is posting in them....you won't See them on the main page.

Even the Best Idea/thread in the World...will Not gain traffic unless you are in there Supporting it......YOU ARE IN THERE SUPPORTING IT...............
We can not do that for you...you want it...you Literally have to Work for it..........

 

[Mossy]

Before @420Forever freaks out

 

[Mossy]

View attachment 1670178

See the little set of tags? If we edit these in, or require these to be added to new post content, that alone would help increase the searchability for Google.

Gonna do a thread on this in Cultivators...........

 

[Son of Hobbes]

Before you throw all sorts of tech at us....Remember......you might be the Vic...vi...Volunteer doing it......so Please no pages of Theory.....Practical Help Needed..............

Nope, no new tech for now. We're gonna work with what our mommas gave us for a bit.