Is anyone hearing us?

Is anyone hearing us?

Postby Maurice Goldsmith » Sun Sep 13, 2015 8:01 am

I've been assuming that posts on this forum would be visible via the search engines, and there's evidence that the 'bots are crawling it. However I've been feeding the titles of many of the topics here into Google and so far not a single one has come up. It looks like we're invisible!

Maybe this is a deliberate choice, but I'd vote in favour of the posts being visible - it would attract new members to the forum.
Maurice
I am the author of a post-apocalyptic novel - The Lucifer Bug http://www.theluciferbug.com/
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Re: Is anyone hearing us?:Avuncular Pumpkin search

Postby tahanson43206 » Sun Sep 13, 2015 1:19 pm

In reply to Maurice ...

The four search engines I have seen visiting the-knowledge forum are: Yahoo, Bing, Google and Baidu

Your report of topics not found is concerning but not conclusive ...

The Subject for this message was set to: avuncular pumpkin ... in light of the season at hand, and to create a string that would be easy to call up.

If the expression is enclosed in quotes the result set will not include the 10 million references to the individual words.

It had definitely been my hope and expectation that postings here would become available to anyone doing a search, so then the challenge would be to find search terms that people would be looking for.

From my point of view, it is desirable to gather folks who want to make a positive difference in the world, and who are attracted to the challenge of preserving the thin veneer of civilization we have now, or to recover as much as possible when it is lost. The dissolution of Syria is as good an example of the loss of civilization as we need to be inspired to action.

If your tests of search engine performance based upon forum topics turn out to be generally true, then we would be forced to use the tried and true recruiting techniques based upon old school marketing and personal invitations to friends and acquaintances to join the enterprise.

The search engines stop by every few days, so I'm planning to give them a week before starting to look for evidence they picked up this message.

(th)
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Re: Is anyone hearing us?: Majestic-12

Postby tahanson43206 » Sat Sep 19, 2015 1:02 pm

Today I found the search engine Majestic-12 on site.

If this was the first visit by this bot, it may not have added any text it found to its database.

Here is the result that came up when I asked it about the search phrase: "avuncular pumpkin"

Begin Quotation:
Sorry! We do not have any results for the phrase: ""avuncular pumpkin"".

If you expected to see a result, please don't worry, your search term may not have been in our dictionary.

We have now added, ""avuncular pumpkin"", and will include it in our searches. You should check back in a few days to see if we have found any results.
End Quotation.

(th)
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Re: Is anyone hearing us? Two weeks Update

Postby tahanson43206 » Sat Oct 03, 2015 12:12 pm

"Avuncular Pumpkin" was defined as a search term for this forum, on September 13th.

As of October 3rd, the term was still not found by Google.

The challenge for Dr. Dartnell's IT support team may be the fact that the forum exists as a branch from the main web site.

It is possible that search engines do not follow such branches.

If it turns out that search engines cannot "see" this forum, it is still possible to grow readership the old fashioned way ... by creating content worth reading, and using traditional marketing methods to increase awareness of the forum.

The opportunity for the 200+ members Dr. Dartnell has accepted into the forum community, is to select one or more topics about which they are passionate, and then to post a message about the topic(s) at least once a week, or as often as is comfortable.

Possible topics include both those that would be helpful to individuals and families trying to cope with disaster, AND those that would be helpful to individuals and families thinking about living independently, in comfort and security, at a location away from Earth.

The "Mars One" applicants would (presumably) be quite interested in a body of practical knowledge that would describe everything they need to have with them as they embark for the Red Planet.

(th)
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Re: Is anyone hearing us? Followup

Postby tahanson43206 » Fri Oct 16, 2015 2:18 pm

"Avuncular Pumpkin" was defined as a search term for this forum, on September 13th.

As of October 16th, the term was still not found by Google. Elapsed time now exceeds one month.

The challenge for Dr. Dartnell's IT support team may be the fact that the forum exists as a branch from the main web site.

It is possible that search engines do not follow such branches.

An update for those who are following this thread is that a member of the forum created a test forum branching from the main web site, to see if the search problem is solvable.

The preliminary test results are encouraging. I will now add "avuncular pumpkin" to the test forum, to see if Google finds it.

(th)
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Re: Is anyone hearing us?

Postby steve » Mon Oct 19, 2015 1:04 pm

Google is indexing discuss.the-knowledge.org, you can verify this by searching for "site:discuss.the-knowledge.org".

Strangely searching for "site:discuss.the-knowledge.org pumpkin" returns no results, but searching for other key words on the site does find threads such as "site:discuss.the-knowledge.org svalbard".

I suspect the problem is mostly down to the way Google decides if your page is important or not, if there are few or no links to a page and it receives little traffic it's unlikely to do well in the search. If the forum grows in popularity then better search ranking will follow naturally. Trying to game it in some way is likely to have negative effects.
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