OPENCACHING NORTH AMERICA

Just a cute little post here. What was it, August 2015 opencaching.com went dark? They still showed up before us on a Google or Yahoo/Bing search for the word. Pretty recently, they are now out of the picture. And when I say Yahoo/Bing, they have long since combined their search efforts; you'll pretty much get the same results at either. This is in the U.S. too, I might add. Our Canadian friends might find different results.

Well I tried a few Goggle searches in a "safe window" (in hopes of not influencing the results based on past site visits - no idea how that works) and I have to say that OCNA continues to rank poorly in terms of search results. To me it doesn't add up since my cache listing get many views and you know there is decent traffic to the site. Using the term "geocaching", after 10 pages of results I still don't see OCNA.

If I search "free geocaching" then OCNA comes up in 5th place

If I searched "opencaching" I get these results in order:
opencaching.de
opencaching.eu
opencache.uk
a youtube channel (I think this is forced by Google, always seems to be a youtube hit in the top 5)
reddit (discussion about the Garmin site being dead)
garmin.com/en-US/geocaching
opencaching.fr
opencaching.pl
2 other websites complaining about the Garmin site

OCNA doesn't even show up until the top of page 3!!!!

Now change that to "opencache" and OCNA is the first result.

Something wrong here.....

EDIT: the above results are for CANADA - looks like OCNA ranks #1 for the term "opencaching" in USA.

Yeh, i quit looking after page 21 in a Google search for geocaching.

I even found what look like a primitive email message on page 17 for GPSGames discussing the use of the term cache in place of stash.
HOW we end up below that listing is beyond me.
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This all falls under the umbrella of SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. I have done this crap, to the best of my abilities! When I became webmaster in 2013, this site had no account at Google or Bing/Yahoo webmaster tools, had very few META tags in the source code (although many will tell you that is ancient history, and search engines no longer care about them), and no site map. We have all them now! I see there is some chatter in the private sub forum about this, I will elaborate more there later, for anyone who cares.

And yes, If you're gong to do a search for this site, log out of your accounts at the search engines, and even better, open up an incognito window, as they call it on Google Chrome, for example.

Opie is dead and so is that guy with a GPS (Navicache)
This was just brought to mind by a recent submission to the OCNA database by Mad
Appears Mad is slowly moving their caches over to OCNA. NC caches from 2009
No finds on earlier listings here but then they were not getting any on NC either

Just wait until the Waymarking site is officially killed off, which will be very soon I think. You know OCNA will get flooded with virtuals.

Virtuals are really the only cache type that works for me, hoprefully someday OCNA will have more players in my area.

Funny, I googled Opie geocaching and my old listing came up.http://www.opencaching.us/viewcache.php?cacheid=2135

We still have a few caches there, but the area is under construction, and really messed up the D/T rating on my 5/5. It's still quite difficult, but not as much of a bramble there anymore, so I had to go back and re-route my trail tacks.

I thought maybe I should bring my old listing here back as a BIT hybird, but hit a few snags with printing the BIT code.

KnowsOpie wrote:Funny, I googled Opie geocaching and my old listing came up.http://www.opencaching.us/viewcache.php?cacheid=2135

We still have a few caches there, but the area is under construction, and really messed up the D/T rating on my 5/5. It's still quite difficult, but not as much of a bramble there anymore, so I had to go back and re-route my trail tacks.

I thought maybe I should bring my old listing here back as a BIT hybird, but hit a few snags with printing the BIT code.

Does this have to do with the unarchival? (Which I have done).

Mr.Yuck wrote:

KnowsOpie wrote:Funny, I googled Opie geocaching and my old listing came up.http://www.opencaching.us/viewcache.php?cacheid=2135

We still have a few caches there, but the area is under construction, and really messed up the D/T rating on my 5/5. It's still quite difficult, but not as much of a bramble there anymore, so I had to go back and re-route my trail tacks.

I thought maybe I should bring my old listing here back as a BIT hybird, but hit a few snags with printing the BIT code.

Does this have to do with the unarchival? (Which I have done).

Yeah, kinda sorta. The unarchived OCNA is going to be a BIT cache on a nice screw top container all camo taped with a official geocaching label and the BIT on the outside hidden there in a guardrail.

Now I'm having problems printing the BIT.

My error, got it working.