 Poster: A snowHead
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Those of you who still frequent the SCGB Chat Area may have noticed an interesting little change: a seeming sudden increase in the number of threads.
In Chat Guidelines, paragraph 6 states: "A discussion without a reply for 10 days will automatically be archived".
With so few people posting, this rule meant the number of visible posts was steadily reducing. When the number of posts in a forum became zero the forum disappeared. There was clearly the danger the whole place would disappear but for The Night Shift (greetings to Lindsay, Michael and Mark) and David Goldsmith's gentle goadings.
What to do? No Problem. Change the Archive Rule. Though the rule is still stated in the Guidelines as above, the software obviously has different ideas: posts are now visible back to March 30th, and forums no longer disappear when they are empty (as is Equipment Reviews).
Nothing like moving the goal posts.....
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Just out of interest, for those of us without access, just how 'busy' is the SCGB forum in comparison to snowHeads?
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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The SCGB software is inferior to that at Snowheads. For example, once a thread is archived it is not possible to re-activate it so you have to re-start again on a new thread.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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PG, How busy SCGB site? Total of 20 posts so far today:
3 in Skiing General Section
16 in The Ski Club section with Gerry Aitken gamely trying to defend the club's persistent haughty stance.
1 in The Night Shift.
So, really, on the subject of skiing - what the club is meant to be all about - there have been three posts today....
Hardly a hot-bed of activity.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Their 'page views' quoted on the advertisers page seem to have held up pretty well though.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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davidof, the snow reports probably account for that.
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| I Saques wrote: |
| What I want to know is: who were those 25,000 individuals who visited 46,000 times between them in July - and what were they looking for in the 1/2 million pages they read? Info on grass-skiing peut-etre??? |
Probably made up of forum users (we were there last July) and people wanting resort info before they booked....and inaccurate figures.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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PG, we probably need a new smiley with a grass covering just for you 
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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PG, :lol You sure you're not tempted by the Darkside?
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Not a sausage posted in the Members Chat since 8th May. Their login cookie doesn't seem to be working either.
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You know it makes sense.
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Alan Craggs, it's probably gone stale 
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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Anybody else noticed that we set a record today? 39 logged on at once.
End of season blues? A good sign we can get through the summer without going "dead"?
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Poster: A snowHead
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Chris Bish, 'fraid not - it was the googlebot successfully accessing us!
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Ian Hopkinson, the what? And doing what? And is that legal? 
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Mark Hunter, we were being spidered 
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Mark Hunter, search engines, like Google, send out programs to index sites on the web in order to include them in results to user searches. admin has now successfully rendered snowHeads friendly to such approaches, so the content of snowHeads should now be searchable by Google. This will not reveal user names because the googlebot accesses as a guest.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Ian, why is it called a Googlebot?
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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contraction of google robot...
I think its true to say that "sending out programs" is actually a bit inaccurate. The program runs on a machine owned by Google and sends requests for information to snowHeads.
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This is cause for celebration: I've been on this mission for quite some time since, if people who would benefit from the wealth of information and expertise at snowHeads' can't find us then it's a bit of a waste really.
PhpBB is not very search-engine friendly and needs modification to allow a site like this to be fully indexed by Google (or a number of other search engines).
Furthermore, the specific methods of operation of the largest search engines are closely guarded secrets of the magnitude of the formula for Coke or KFC.
There is much hearsay around these subjects and disseminating the data of integrity from the bull has proved to be a fairly lengthy operation.
Anyway, after some changes made last week, snowHeads at last appears prominently in Google searches for strongly relevant terms.
eg. 'ski discussion', 'ski discussion forum', 'ski club discussion' and 'snow ski forum' all deliver snowHeads on the first page of results now.
I'd be interested in suggestions re. likely search-terms people might use which ought to yield snowHeads in the results. However, U cannot cover all possibilities and there are limits to what is achievable within snowHeads alone. It seems a strong weighting is given to links from relevant sites. ie. if we are linked to by many sites which contain the words 'ski club', we will show more prominently in a search for the terms 'ski club'.
Further changes over the weekend finally made snowHeads fully accessible to the Google (and MSN) web crawlers which is what brought on that flurry of activity yesterday. It wasn't exactly a quiet day anyway and as the Googlebots were spidering snowHeads over lunchtime the 39 'record' was set by (I think) 22 logged in users and 17 guests of whom about 15 were Googlebots.
They appeared to roam everywhere a guest is allowed to, so I assume snowHeads to be fully indexed somewhere within Google now. To predict how long this new data will take to reach public access would require information which still lies beyond the veil but I'm hoping it will show up over the next few days.
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Excellent news. Have you tried to add the snowHeads url to the directory-based search engines as well? (And what about Alta Vista, etc?)
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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(Should think it will be difficult to get snowHeads to figure highly in any search that doesn't include 'discussion', forum' etc. Reckon most people search with terms like "ski holiday", "ski resorts"..... or the names of individual resorts. I read somewhere that Google etc were ignoring meta terms/phrases these days... don't know if that's true....
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admin, What about 'ski chat' and 'ski message board'? They were my search terms when I first stumbled on the SCGB website (I didn't know what a 'forum' was then). Also perhaps 'ski advice'?
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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PG, It has been submitted to quite a few of which the ODP www.dmoz.org is probably the most significant.
It hasn't shown up there yet - I believe it usualy takes a while.
Last edited by snowHeads are a friendly bunch. on Wed 12-05-04 16:22; edited 1 time in total
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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Dave Burt, thanks. 'ski chat' we make page7 on a UK sites only search - I'll have a look at improving that. 'ski message board' is also good though we don't show for it at all yet.
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admin, I submitted a web site a few years back using a bit of free software I had. It took about a month, and since then the site appears in the top 10 on almost all search engines.
The downside was that the email address I gave for the submission software is now the one I don't use, as it gets around 200 spams a day.
Have you included words like England, UK, etc in the tags?
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You know it makes sense.
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...Or more targeted names like zermatt, tignes, etc?
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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admin, another thought, google's opening words are the line of text that says "Please adjust any links or shortcuts to snowHeads on your web pages and browsers snowheads.com/phpbb becomes snowheads.com/ski-forum".
How about changing that text so that it says more of who we are, e.g. The forum for those skiers that the SCGB didn't want, or something wittier?
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Poster: A snowHead
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Right. I think I understood most of that.
All the same 22 real snowheads and 15 robots os quite a decent readership.
I presume the robots do ski, or will soon want to with all the contagious enthusiasm we emanate. 
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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And remember the robots cyborg name is: Robotic Obedient Being Optimized for Troubleshooting when they're not skiing (or do you think they would be boarders???)
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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I'd always start off by trying 'skiing', but I try to avoid thinking about anything unless I have to. Apart from that, congratulations to 'Snowheads'!
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Chris Bish, I think the Googlebots tend to spend their time 'surfing'.
PG, Those 'targets' are the reason why we needed the whole site indexed rather than just a few pages. We can't make one page respond well to every search term (think how many resorts we'd need to include) but we have pages and pages of stuff which relate strongly to just these targeted subjects.
I am currently working on a mod to display a thread's topic name in the page title which should help weight a search engine's perceived importance of the page in the right direction for its content.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Hey well done U! snowHeads comes up numero uno on a search for ski discussion forum and third on a worldwide search 
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FAQ
in my sig 
