What is on Your Mind?

FYI, today I moved the "Advanced Stats" page from the forum home page to the search results pages.

This means that at the top of the search results like "Today's Post" and "New Posts" and keyword searches, the stats will appear at the top of that page instead of the home page.

The reason of this change is SEO. Googlebot and other SEO tools complained we have too many links on the home page, so I moved the status (which have 100s of links) to the search page.

This does not effect users much as the same information is available just on a different page other than the "home page".


Also, please note that in the future I plan to move the current home page to "forums" and replace the home page with the latest thread from one or more busy forums, more-than-likely the "Shell Programming and Scripting" forums.

Still need to think about how best to implement this change.

The "home page" is not really useful since it is static and does not change much, so better to move it to "FORUM HOME" and make the home page more dynamic.

Cheers.

Hmmm...

Moving the home page with the stats to a different page and changing the home page to a "featured" page, is not having the intended SEO results for the keyword search "unix".

Will give it another week, and if things do not improve, will reverse this change.

Confirmed.

There is some SEO problem for the main forums page for keyword "unix" which seems was not "fixed" by moving the stats and all those links to a different page.

Of course, it's too early to really tell, but indications are that there is no SEO benefit (and is likely negative SEO) so I may revert this back to how it was sooner than a week and restore the home page as it was before.

Seems creating a more "dynamic featured discussion" home page and moving the stats links to a new pages has not helped keyword "unix" SEO at all....

OK.. .I changed this back to how it was before since our SEO for that page is falling fast.

Oh well, you can't say I did not try... LOL

I should be more patient with SEO and give it a week, but I liked the old home page better and will just have to "suffer" with all the links from the stats pages until I write a better home page app.

Onwards and upward.

OBTW: I made the "featured discussion" page available here, I may do something with this later.

Code:

https://www.unix.com/featured.php

https://www.unix.com/featured.php

This was a short-lived new home page experiment, only to be frowned upon by the Google SEO God.