38 new members that is great. How did June of 11 compare to June of 10?
Oh, sure. Go ahead and ask an embarrassing question, right out here in front of God and everybody. :blush:
I don't have the post counts and member counts from June 2010. However, I do have total traffic numbers from June 2010 and June 2011. :whisper: June 2011 represented a 70.12% increase in traffic over June 2010. :shrug:
Ron, you may be one of the few people who are actually aware of how I earn my living. A disgruntled, former member of this site who left to run his own site (after learning he wasn't going to be allowed to run this one) was running his mouth in some messages to me, back in February. He warned me I better leave him alone (like it's been me playing the wee sockpuppet games on his site, aye?), or my Internet consulting business would suffer. Well, Mr. Know-It-All doesn't. I've never been involved in Internet consulting, a day in my life.
After spending 37+ years in the high performance automotive aftermarket, I was approached by the fastest-growing and one of the top-rated Search Engine Optimization companies in the business. They outlined what my job responsibilities would be and that sounded fine to me. They then outlined the amount I would earn, which was only just a tiny bit over
five times what I was then earning. I took about .0003 nanoseconds to consider that pay increase, before accepting the position. I went to work for them on 4 August 2010, 363 days ago, today. If I can get away with calling 2 hours a day as being actual work, that is.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has always been a passion of mine. Over the last three decades, I have opened something between 60 and 80 Web sites. Some of them were simple test sites that barely lasted two weeks before they were gone again. I tested everything I could think to test. I've modified code one way and then modified it the other way, just to see what the search engines (primarily Google) liked the best. I've tested different forum packages, to see which ones were the most effective. I've tested different blog packages, for the same reasons. There are times I tinker with the way I submit posts to this site, just to see what methods will attract the most search engine activity and to see what methods will be indexed faster and more reliably. (Yes, there are good ways to post and not-so-good ways, if you were wondering.) I have notebooks filled with meticulous notes on the results of my tests. My employer calls me a Google-whisperer, because it is almost as if I can whisper to Google and hear it whisper back to me. Actually, it is the result of years and years of trial and error testing and intense record-keeping. I've never been one to bang my own drum, I prefer to let my actions speak for themselves. But I am willing to state I know the ins and outs of SEO and I am very good at what I do. Fortunately, my employer recognizes that and pays me accordingly.
That disgruntled, former member, who left to run his own site? Whilst he was in attendance at the Bash, he was proud to tell other attendees that he was the guy with the #2 T-Bucket forum site, but he has his eye on being #1. (And that's me, wishing this site could just break into the top 20, aye?) The grapevine has him crowing over his new SEO trick. Instead of visiting his site via a direct link or a browser bookmark, he's found he can really improve his site by searching for it on Google and then visiting his site from one of the results. :roll: That's known as spoofing and it only works once, every 24 hour period. And once Google has finally accumulated enough traffic data on his site, the spoof will stand out like the nose on his face and he'll end up being penalized for it. And he has no understanding of how or why, which makes it even funnier. I suppose if he understood that wee secret, he would start too understand why he's so easy to spot when he pays his wee visits here. And don't fool yourselves, it's a rare day when he's not here at least once. He imagines different usernames and different e-mail addresses will cloak his identity, but what he fails to realize is he couldn't be more obvious if he stepped in red paint before he comes here. There have been times when I've been in position to see him arrive, see where he's come from and then watched where he's away to when he leaves. But now, he knows how to improve his site in the Google rankings?
What the poor child fails to understand is that we get more search visits, from more key
words than he has total
posts. And I'm fixin' to tear our current numbers up, as soon as I can get this site upgraded to IP.Board 3.2.0. Look out, because we've not even begun to scratch at the surface of what things will be like in the coming months.
When we converted from vBulletin to Invision forum software, that decision came after a couple months of some careful testing and study. I was looking at all aspects of any package. I wanted something that ran fast, that was full-featured and was already ahead of the game on SEO. It would likely panic most of you to know how close we came to a WordPress MU installation with BuddyPress running on it. But I could see Invision was going to give us the best bang for the buck. Last October, I upgraded the site from IP.Board 3.1.2 to 3.1.3. And within two weeks, our search engine numbers were dropping like a stone. By 1 December, our search engine traffic was down over 48% and our long tail search numbers were less than one-third what they had been. We lost over half of the indexed pages we had on Google. I was pressing every panic button I could press. I showed my records to Invision and they said they had done nothing. I jumped into the code and started seeing things that could be improved, so I was editing code like a madman. Results it had taken me three years to achieve were gone, within days. In mid-December, IP. Board 3.1.4 was released. By late-January, I could see things were starting to recover, but it was going to take years to get back to where we had been, three months earlier. So, I attacked the 3.1.4 files with the same vengeance. By March, we had recovered 50% of what we had lost. By late-May, we were already seeing better numbers than I had ever seen with IP.Board 3.1.2. As of today, our long tail search numbers are double what they were in March. I cannot believe the recovery we've experienced. It had honestly taken me over three years to get things to where they were last September. We lost a huge chunk of it and I've managed to restore it in less than nine months.
There are white hat SEO techniques and there are black hat SEO tricks. And we all know tricks are for kids. I do not resort to any black hat tricks, because they always provide short-term results and they almost always lead to a site being sandboxed. Over 53% of our site traffic comes from the search engines, Google accounting for nearly 43% of the total. Risk nearly half of the traffic that reaches this site each day? Nae chance that will be happening!
That oher fellow has one SEO technique down pat. If you follow his trail, you'll see he's a link-dropper. He drops links to his site, everywhere he goes. That is a definite plus when it comes to SEO. I suppose I could start posting wacked-out nonsense on the H.A.M.B., the NTBA site or on B.C.'s site and dropping links in all of them, but I'm just not into spamming other sites, so I don't do it. Like I said, I prefer to wear a white hat. No need to deal from the bottom of the deck, when you can produce positive results without it.
In July, our Google indexed page count increased by over 12%. The results on the search phrase
tbucketeers increased by over 13%. A search on the phrase
t-bucket forums provides approximately 10,500,000 results. The top four spots belong to this site. B.C.'s forums come in at number 5. The hotrodders.com site comes in at number 6. The NTBA site appears at number 7. I'm down at number 8 before I see the alleged number 2 site. And that's on a pretty simple keyword search.
But let's look at another common search term and see where #2 ends up, shall we?
A search on the phrase
t-bucket returns approximately 20,200,00 results, and that will be us us in at number 1. :bow: I looked back through page 10 (100 results) and wasn't able to find any sign of that alleged #2 site.
I wonder where he got that #2 figure? Out of thin air? Out of a hat? Out of his arse? No matter, because I'm not here to lie to anyone, I'm not here to inflate numbers to anyone and you can see the images to support what I am saying. Ol' Mike, he gets heavily criticized by the self-appointed and so-called experts, but ol' Mike can always back up what he says with proof and facts. I sometimes wonder why they make things so easy for me to refute with the truth?
Ron, some of my obligations around here go a bit deeper than just giving people a place to talk about T-Buckets. Every member on this site has entrusted me with personal information and I feel it is my responsibility to be sure that information is as secure as I can make it. And my offer to sponsors is to help drive traffic to their sites. If I can't pull traffic into this site, it makes it pretty difficult to drive traffic on to you fellows. So I work very hard to increase our incoming traffic. And, as you can see from the numbers, I've been able to do a fair-to-middlin' job of that. And maybe, just maybe, one of these days, I'll be able to say this site has managed to become one of the top 20 T-Bucket sites. :winkn:
