Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

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Mr.Yuck
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Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by Mr.Yuck » Sun Oct 13, 2013 5:37 pm

I didn't think I should do an "announcement" for this one, so I'll just post it here. I can't say traffic at this website is at an all time high, but I wouldn't doubt it is. Reason: I came on board in March, and used Google webmaster tools to get this website on the first page of search results for the word "Geocaching". Previously, it was on like the 15th page, and like 200th in the results. Don't get me wrong, I'd never brag; that is beyond my wildest dreams. I figured best I could do was like the 4th page or something. But it just happened. It depends on your Geographic location, but sometimes, we actually show up 3rd in the results, after Geocaching.com, and the Wikipedia page on Geocaching. I believe we are consistently ahead of Garmin's website, and never worse than the 2nd page. I have NOT been able to duplicate this feat at Bing/Yahoo (which have combined forces).

Like I say, I can't say traffic is at an all-time high, as I don't believe RVRoadTrip or Coffee Peddlers had any kind of stats enabled before me (I installed Google Analytics in April). If they did have any, I haven't found them. We have over 100 new accounts created a week, and that's way up from say like a year ago. For example, 16 accounts were created on the date of this post. You can always see our 8,000 strong membership list via a link in the upper right hand corner of this fourm, under "members". If you go to the last page though, or a couple proceeding it, it's going to be blank. Easily explained, we've deleted several dozen Spammer accounts. :mrgreen:

So I'm going to seed this forum with a few posts, and see how it goes. In the meantime, I suppose the purpose of this post is for reporting where you see openCaching North America in your local results when searching for the word "Geocaching". It varies wildly, in the U.S. and Canada. I actually get different results from home, and work, about 20 miles away.
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glorkar
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by glorkar » Thu Dec 12, 2013 9:16 pm

For me today it was the first result on page 2 of google. Not bad at all.
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Mr.Yuck
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by Mr.Yuck » Fri Dec 13, 2013 8:27 am

glorkar wrote:For me today it was the first result on page 2 of google. Not bad at all.

Thanks, I don't think I ever have received a report from your neck of the woods! I think that's where we're generally settling in almost all of the United States, near the top of the 2nd page.

For a while, I thought totally logging out of any Google accounts you may have would give you "natural" results, but that doesn't seem to always be the case. I can show us after Geocaching.com and the wikipedia entry for Geocaching almost every time from a computer I regularly use.

I am the domain name owner, but I'll tell you what. Anytime I'm at someone else's computer that isn't at work or at my house, and I feel comfortable enough doing so, I say "hey, Google the word Geocaching for me, will you"? :mrgreen:
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by Mr.Yuck » Fri Dec 13, 2013 9:30 am

By the way, someone in the Groundspeak forums just ran these stats for Geocaching.com, and it said it was worth $450,000. So I ran them for this website. I'm not taking a penny under 10 bucks for it. :mrgreen:

Statstool.com Stats for Opencaching.us

P.S. I ran Terracaching.com, Navicache.com, and GPSGames.org, so they'll load faster, if anyone wants to look at them. Navicache and GPSGames.org are worth exactly the same as us. Terracaching.com is worth a whopping $227. They are the only one of the 4 of us with a Google Page Rank of 5. The rest of us are a 4, so that could be it.
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by Mr.Yuck » Fri Dec 13, 2013 9:28 pm

Whoa, thanks, uMainah. Very interesting stuff. As the Domain Name owner, I know about this carp, there are hundreds of "domain name worth" websites out there. The very first one that comes up on a Google search say's we're worth almost 2 grand. Here ya' go I hope that one wasn't used to calculate the worth of Navicache.com when it was sold, although I wouldn't doubt it was. :shock:

P.S. they pretty much nailed our website traffic at that one. And they all use Alexa rank, I've found that to fluctuate wildly. Like plus or minus a million per month.
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by DudleyGrunt » Wed Dec 18, 2013 3:30 pm

I tried it being logged out of Google, so as to not skew the results and I got us at #3 (from Northern Virginia). #4 was one of my OCNA virtuals that is very nearby. OC.com came in at #5. I then did it while logged into Google and the only difference was that GSAK showed up between the main OCNA listing and my virtual.
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by Mr.Yuck » Fri Dec 27, 2013 4:04 pm

DudleyGrunt wrote:I tried it being logged out of Google, so as to not skew the results and I got us at #3 (from Northern Virginia). #4 was one of my OCNA virtuals that is very nearby. OC.com came in at #5. I then did it while logged into Google and the only difference was that GSAK showed up between the main OCNA listing and my virtual.
Logging out of any Google accounts usually gives a more accurate representation of where we show up, but I think it's still skewed by cookies stored in your browser. Try deleting all history, THEN do a Google search of the word Geocaching. I usually show us on the 2nd page, but still ahead of Garmin. Can't argue with that!! I also see our friends at Navicache are up to page 3, they were page 4 a couple weeks ago. And they definitely did something, they used to be on like page 15 like we were 6 months ago and in the past.

Anywho, I think a MAJOR factor in our high search ranking was throwing up a sitemap for the search engines. This site had no sitemap at all when I came on board. It hadn't been updated since September, but I just had a new one made. You can view it at http://www.opencaching.us/sitemap.xml and it indexes 8,800 pages. I use http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com and it's outstanding. I can't believe they do it for free. Many of the free sitemap websites will only index 500 pages, and they want money to make an 8,800 page one. :D
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by Mr.Yuck » Tue Dec 31, 2013 4:13 pm

FINALLY, after 9 months of pulling my hair out trying to figure out why (or why not, as the case may be), I have gotten the blog up high on a search of "Geocaching Blogs", "Geocaching Bloggers", or "Geocaching Blog". I had to do it in a clever fashion however. A few weeks ago, I noticed our links page (as seen in the top bar of every page on the website) was coming up on the 4th or 5th page of these searches. So even though people clicking on that link might see "blog" on the tap bar of the website as well, I added our own blog as the first link. And it shows up in the text people see in the Google search.

Please, anyone, let me know where you find us (i.e. our "links" page), in a search of "Geocaching Blogs", "Geocaching Bloggers", or "Geocaching Blog". I'm generally getting it on the 2nd page of results these days.

More good news for the Blog, I suppose, I'm seeing us on the 2nd page of a Yahoo or Bing search for the term Geocaching Blogs. Yahoo and Bing have combined forces to use the same crawler bots, and pretty much split 25% of the American search engine market in half with 12-13% apiece.
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Re: Traffic is up, discussions on the forum are way down..

Post by TermiteHunter » Tue Dec 31, 2013 6:21 pm

On my phone signed in to Google the links page is#9 on the second page.

The were two individual articles from the blog on the first page

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