Riddle Me This, Batman...
Posted by Prof. Goose on July 30, 2006 - 12:34am
Topic: Site news
Savinar (known to you as AMPOD) and I were bantering in a comment thread last week about TOD traffic stats. I brought up the fact that TOD is, according to The Truth Laid Bear, #155 in web traffic (measured in unique visits--for all of the sites TTLB tracks--and if we doubled our traffic we would barely crack the top 100), but #2189 in the number of temporary and permanent links to TOD (again--that TTLB can track) from others in the 'sphere. (noting also that technorati has a higher number of cumulative links).
I think one reason for this is that we haven't been around all that long compared to some of the more ancient sites, and we kind of missed the initial "blogrolling" phenomenon. The other may be that not a lot of the bigger blogs link to "niche" (or "controversial") blogs like this one.
The traffic number is really great, we're up there pretty darned high. But, any thoughts on this? Is this something we should work on?
This site is destined to become a "superstar" since That Other Site is taking on more of a "nuke their ass, we want their gas" attitude, between all the junk about wanting a girlfriend, whether 9-11 was a hoax, substitutes for The Blue Pill, and other dreck.
Keeping it on the PO topic, keeping it high quality, is the way to go.
I think the point of this thread is, the Original Poster wants to get suggestions for how to get MORE hits even though this site is growing exponentially. Because MORE is GOOD.
which other site? initials at least, please, for us lazy and clueless?
A conceivable reason for the low linkage would be if TOD's readers tend not to be bloggers themselves. Is this true? HIIK.
(new acronym, disguising profanity, so as not to alarm the net nanny SW)
they don't seem to understand that having a arsenal at your disposal just makes you a big target for any government crackdown that will happen as depletion kicks in.
Hummm, this sounds like something I would hear from Walmart?
Seriously, how many and who do you really want coming to this site?
If you had 5 million people coming here every day could we even begin to wade through all the posts and would there be enough of them on "Peak Oil" to justify the time and effort of those of us who come here particularly for the technical information? (And the level of technical information is really great ! Thank you to all those with the capability to provide all the great articles and graphs - which I love even if it does take long down loads on my slow rural dial-up account)
The fact that there are some very valuable bits of information in some of the comments makes it worth it now to wade through the large amount of off topic stuff to find the good technical information. If the level of comment posting goes up significantly I would have to cease to go through the comments just from a time standpoint. And I am afraid the noise ratio of off vs on topic posts would get much greater.
I think the old addage of "Think carefully what you ask for, you just might get it" comes in to play.
Was only going to put my 2 cents worth in and rang up a 15 dollar rant. Sorry.
This site is outstanding, in part because of the collegiality that comes from not being overrun.
What matters is not the numbers of people we get, but the quality. For instance, I'd be willing to bet that the writers of the Chicago Trib piece on Peak Oil lurked on our site, in order to help with their research. There needs to be a place where reasonable people can go to get quality information and reasonable, (mostly) civil discourse.
if I had the communication skills required to be an effective contributer here at tod my post would have sounded alot more like jon kutz's
again sorry for the... you know
There is still a lot of misinformation out there, which we can set straight .. I think DIGG, and others are a good place to raise awareness out there in cyberland, and especially with the younger demographic that tends to be online, who are large consumers, and tend to make better informed decisions (think buying economical cars, voting etc)..
I encourage all TOD'rs to create accounts and get linking !!
TOD ranks well on Google for "peak oil"--#8 in my search, lower part of page 1. Issue: "peak oil" is still a bit of a term for the cognoscenti--the people who know the language can find us easily, and those who don't can't.
We are outside of the top 60 on the other search terms, including the most common, "oil price." (And that is probably the hardest term to rank well on.) Note, on the bottom graph, that there is huge news volume on oil prices, and very little on the depletion issues that are causing the high prices.
My suggestion: let's find a way to tie TOD to oil price references.
8000+ visitors per day is a good number. I imagine you have a very high percentage of return visitors, which is bad for PPC revenue; I hope you make enough to pay for the bandwidth anyway.
The TTLB Top 100 tend to be either highly partisan political blogs or blogs with very high technology/geek/nerd content. #155 for a niche topic like energy policy is excellent. My blog -- which is about bicycles -- has been linked to by a couple of the top 100 only when I deliberately create link bait, and it's always on something technology or blog-geek related. If you get mentioned on Boing Boing, BTW, you'll instantly get linked to from at least a dozen other blogs. But I digress -- TOD will only make BoingBoing if you demonstrate a pie-in-the-sky way to harvest fat from people to make biofuel.
Vulgar language doesn't seem to be a factor in a blog's popularity; and in fact many of the top blogs are very heavy in it. And I'm amused by those who advocate free speech and then immediately pounce on those who object to language.
Back to TOD's number 8 ranking on Google -- something is wrong because in spite of 2500 backlinks to the home page and nearly 200,000 thousands links altogether into TOD, you only have a Google PageRank of 2. I think you can improve your placement on Google with some effort. Yahoo has your old blogspot site on page four of results. On MSN you're at the top of page two. If you want to work on SEO, you'll need to make decisions about what search phrases you want to rank for.
Good suggestions. FYI, we have referred to another site explaining how to harvest fat from people to make biofuel. Nobody cared, probably because it was a thin guy. http://www.earthrace.net/view.asp?webpage=1228
by the way, RR, here's one of my posts on the gas tax:
http://www.theoildrum.com/classic/2005/08/repost-gas-tax-increases-revisited.html
http://www.theoildrum.com/classic/2005/06/picture-of-depletion.html
still applicable, much like many of HO and Stuart's posts. :)
AdWords
Let us have an informal rule against foul language. It adds nothing to the quality of our discussion and it means that hundreds of thousands (a million? How can anybody know?) of potential visitors to the site are blocked by censorship programs at public and school libraries.
Can anything think of a good reason NOT to have an informal ban on profanity, obscenity, and blasphemy?
By golly, no freakin way!
go talk about your dick somewhere else then. I'd appreciate it.
maybe we could get the hardcore doomers to converse in there own thread
"the doombeat"
I can't even recommend this site to close friends cause the doomers drown out the po discussion. that sucks
Tell me why LATOC ranks number one when you type "oil" into Google. Explain that to me.
Explain that to me. Please.
How does that work?
Even Matt can't pull that off, shithead.
I think some of this may come down to keywords, and, are "metatags" still used in web pages? I think it's a very good point that people are most likely to look up things pertaining to current events, who knows, maybe a "Peak Oil And Lebanon" article, feature, something, may boost this site's numbers.
Let's do a trade: here at TOD, please post the stuff you currently put up on your own site. Then, take what you're posting here, and put it over there.
Yup. You can learn an awful lot about people from poultry.
Well, Hallelujia to the Law of Unintended Consequences! I do think there IS an informal ban on profanity, implemented by a great many posters not engaging in it, and reminding each other that it's possible and preferable to do likewise. But when some folks descend into an f-bomb fest, it does have the effect of showing by contrast how sensibly and carefully other people at this site are working to communicate.
I've been drawn into the occasional muck-fest, and immediately regret it, since we are all trying to figure out what kind of people we are dealing with, and generally only have raw-text and a few between-the-lines-intuitions to do it with.
I did like the SouthPark movie's take on how misplaced it is to demonize potty-talk above, say violence, or Canadians, but that doesn't do much to help those who decide to fling it around here as if it's powerful and biting expression from looking like hapless idiots.
"Always tell the truth. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest" Mark Twain
Bob Fiske
I have a computer degree (wich put me right along chikens and some other small animals in the food chain) but I have mastered ways to put forward a website in the first search result in google.
It involve using that kind of code on EVERY pages in any website :
<meta name="keywords" content="ville de Roberval, Roberval, Politique Culturelle, Culture, arts, musique, spectacles, sports">
<meta name="description" content="Ce site contient toute l'information reliée à la ville de Roberval.">
I modify slightly each page to contain the right keyword that fit the page but since it's for Roberval, I always include Roberval. Theses have got me from unkown rank beyond page 20 in google to top result in about 2 month after I made the new website.
Meta tags really do help
That was before the surgery. But (as you know) that got botched REAL BAD and now there's a court case so I can't talk too much about it right now. Once it's resolved I'll fill folks in on the details and post the before and after photos.
At the very least, you can take comfort in knowing that you have sympathy from a number of others.
My theory is the success (as measured by traffic) of any peak oil site is 80% due to world events: Hurricane Katrina, the price of oil, etc.
Sometimes people will email to say "Matt you've done such a good job." I typically reply, "really I just happened to put the site up at the right time just as the war in Iraq was going to shit and the price of oil started climbing aggresively."
Even the best maintained po site in the world would not have gotten 500 visits a day in 1998.
There have been a lot of good conversations here and a ton of good information posted. I think a cherrry picking of the the threads to create a real tomb of the issues would be fantastic.
www.peakoil.com does this to some extent right now with there sticky threads. I think a wiki format would be beast.
Making all the information more accesible will really improve sticky traffic and linking.
This is THE premier peak-oil site. We bow to no one. If you want to understand oil - YOU come here. Understand?
I see this as a good sign, in science, there's never one be-all and end-all. The One True Source Of Knowledge is found in things like religion, and Peak Oil isn't a religion, it's a discovery. Or something.
Nice Try. (although not a very good one). Yaaaaaaawn.
"No I don't. I can look at whatever I want. Fuck You. You're an idiot. Bite me."
See the "Hall of Flames" folder at http://www.peakoil.com forums. There you can interact with like minded people as much as you desire.
This site excels on the geeky, left-brained stuff. But, to be frank, it's a bit "human-impaired." We're a group that's self-selected for interest in ideas and things more than people.
I bet it never even occurred to many of us here that we should thank those who link back to us, and reciprocate. Or even that we should check to see if anyone linked to us.
Your idea is a great one. We should have someone well-versed in blogging etiquette who can "share the link love."
(But don't look at me. There's a reason why I'm an engineer...)
We hit a lot of comment boxes, started discussions, and blogwhored everywhere for the first few months...
There seems to be a shortage of new threads per day, with all comments being dumped into the one thread, making it very long and jumbled. And then you start a new thread each day so nothing gets resolved or argued right through to a conclusion.
I am a Stuart Staniford fan, but after one of his mind-boggling statistical analyses, the thread sometimes goes a hundred comments without talking stats at all. BTW, have you heard about this new car that actually runs on water, really !
If the name of the game is to get lots of hits, then I would suggest that these problems could be easily fixed by encouragement and a strong "Off Topic" rule so that if an editor thinks a comment is off topic, they can force it into a new thread.
Dave
www.peakoil.org.au
10 mins is a long time for a page load and I can imagine that is frustrating. Have you considered using the text-only feature from your browser?
This is a LOT of work and it will not improve anything, try herding cats instead.
I think what matters is to have the "live" threads still reachable from the main page no matter how old.
For this a "most recent comments" list could be made or some suchlike variant of, most recently commented thread or most recently commented "zero level comment" (the ones which are in reply of the thread post not of deeper nested comments).
The main point being to keep this list of "seeds" small enough to appear in the home page in spite of the large number of comments.
Of course, since we have a few suckers here who will immediately try to abuse the system, a worthwhile add on would be some form of blacklist for abusers, their comments not being censored but counting for naught for prioritizing the "live" threads.
I like the lean aspect of the threads and would not have this turned to "commercial looking" stuff as peakoil.com, I find this distracting.
I have recently been put off reading a blog I appreciated when they turned from a clean blog format to a more cluttered one.
As for caring with dialup users it could help a lot to have some automatic breakup of large sub-threads into "artificial root threads" while still keeping a back link to the original thread.
A note for Super G: Is it possible to customize the Scoop software specifically for TOD, if so I could give a hand with this.
As for Google, it appears that the higher ranking sites to the 'Peal Oil' search promote themselves (by title tag, if nothing else) with the 'Peak Oil' moniker. Changing the 'Discussions about Energy and our Future' tagline to include the term 'Peak Oil' might bump the google ranking by a spot or two -- but Google may weigh the url more heavily than the title in search results, so it's hard to s