Gaussian

It might not show yet, but Photoshopgurus is slowly on its way back. Traffic has improved lately with 25%.
We were ranked in the past with keywords Photoshop forum in Google on page 6, we're now on page one in 5th place (I want to get us in the top 3); a huge improvement. Because of this you might have noticed a slight increase in people who joined. If I ignore the months Oct-Nov-Dec in which we had lots of spam that messed up our statitics, then I can only conclude that we never had so many new members in one month since Novermber 2005 (and we still have a few days to go). The number of people we had online (21 at the same time) a few days ago is also the highest in one year.

This will increase once I submit all our tutorials to those tutorial sites that don't have them in our database yet. So for those who think the site is dead...think again...things will get at least 5 times better and if you don't believe me, then you don't know me...

But....I will repeat again; traffic alone doesn't automatically guarantee an active forum. A good example is my other site where I have 10 times more traffic and where the forum is pretty much covered with spider webs. It's not the number of people that make a forum a success, it's the kind of people, please remember that.

docilebob

Congrats Gaussian. Well done.
~golf clap~

Gaussian

Thanks docilebob.

p?tr?

Way to go Gaussian! I haven't been around much lately, but I have noticed that this forum has been more active. I think you've done a superb job at getting this site back on track. Thank you!
3 Cheers for Gaussian!!!
:} :} :}

Lee

Two thumb up, buddy. [righton] [righton]

Gaussian

Thanks guys. 8))

Just to give you an idea how a higher Google ranking affects traffic to PSG.

Traffic PSG from Google:

July: 2384
Aug: 2646
Sept: 2585
Oct: 3170
Nov: 3684
Dec: 3213
Jan: 4395 (estimate with 2 day to go)

So here you can see the clear upward trend. I'm a statistics guy, because without them it's very difficult to understand how certain web design changes affect traffic.

To give you an idea; I added a forum button yesterday at the bottom of every tutorial; not only will this affect traffic coming to the forum directly (since many people visit the site not via the home page, but a tutorial link), it will also affect the Google ranking of the forum in the long run.

You have to understand that for a good Google search engine ranking it's not only important to rank better than competitive sites, it's also important to make your most important pages rank better, it's called Google Ranking. Those who have the Google Toolbar installed can check the Google ranking of any web page (a number between 0-10...the higher the better).
A higher Google ranking will affect the ranking of your pages in the Google search engine.

It takes sometimes days, weeks and months before one will notice the changes, but I have applied them to other sites and they always resulted in a substantial increase in traffic, the reason why I might sound optimistic sometimes. It's also traffic that doesn't easily fade away.

See, my point of view is this; you can have a forum with a lot of direct forum traffic but if you have little Google traffic and people stay away on the forum, then the whole forum collapses (which what happened in the past). This however is going to be very unlikely when there is a steady flow of Google traffic. It's now 4000+ people a month, but I'm planning to increase that to at least 12,000 (for now that is )

I will continue to post these numbers so that you can see over time that traffic indeed increases. This to avoid that people get the idea that the site is dead just by looking at the forum activities. The point is this; we can have 1,000 people on a forum every day, but if they're all "wacthers" then you won't see a lot of activity. That's why it's important if you care about the future of PSG and you have some spare time, to write a post now and then. Let me say that it never stopped me from posting several times a day when PSG only had 75(!) members several years ago. You need to have that faith if you want to make this forum a success and I had it even when we only had 75 members.

sPECtre

4th place today!
:}

I'm really wondering how you did... links exchages?

Gaussian

Yes, you're right, it is #4. The reason why it showed up as #5 on my side is because every time when I'm visiting Google.com when I click on the home button, I will be redirected to Google.ca instead and that's where I'm ranked #5. The only way to avoid this is, which I didn't do, to type in http://64.233.179.104/ instead, because that will direct me to Google.com.

Sadly I can?t tell you how I did it. I?ve been very successful with my approach for other sites (many #1 spots on first Google page with popular keywords)) and plan to sell my knowledge one day in the form of an E-book. I would love to share some of this info for free (I?ve done with a few fellow webmasters) but I also have high hosting fees and I think it?s not too much to ask a webmaster a small amount so that he can get thousands of extra visitors on a site (can be financially very attractive depending on the site).

Btw, I haven?t done any new link exchanges. The results were achieved by redesigning the site, not so much for looks, but for search engine rankings (mainly Google). Actually the major promotion of the site hasn?t started yet (still have to work out some details first).

Joy Foraker

Speaking of ratings, I designed and maintain a site for a client whos site suddenly appeared #1 and 2 in the google ratings. He was pleased with the ranking but amazed that the word "viagra" appeared in the subtext below his url in google. So was I! because viagra is not a product they sell. It took me a while to find out what was going on. Turns out someone hacked his site and under the </html> tag at the bottom (where I didn't think to look at first) the hacker used javascript to add 1,800 viagra links from all over the world. They actually added those links to every page. Uploading clean pages wouldn't do it because of where they put the links. I had to clean it up on the site. Now I change his password every month and I make them complicated. Google metacrawler (or what every they call their software that gathers data) has still not updated the site and removed the viagra links- I wrote them but no response so far.

Gaussian

One some servers, like Google.ca for example, we have now climbed to spot #3, on the main Google.com server we've climbed to #4. Traffic from Google is still increasing and will this month reach about 5600 (was 4400 in January).

It is estimated that the number of new registrations this month will reach 90 (now 72). To give you a comparison: the best month since August 2005 (what we have statistics of) was 60 new members, an increase of that "top" month with 50%.

So we have clearly more people coming to this site, we have clearly more new people registering on our forum, all what lacks is people participating. :cry: