This is fine with me as long as it’s secondary to optimizing the forum for our members
I do what I can to keep Google out of our business, but if you're online, you're in the Google business. Google is the source of 99% of our new traffic, and 100% of our new members.
Please note: the rest of this isn't aimed at you or anyone else. This is sheer nerdery, to put in context the back-end stuff I'm wrestling with.
We had in fact fallen out of their good graces for a while, and went long stretches of time with falling traffic and virtually no new members. I've been doing everything I can to reverse that trend, and I've been making progress. We've set all-time records for new arrivals through search results in each of the past two months, and I feel like it's getting better....
....but there's only so much I can do if we keep making the kinds of posts that they have warned us in very, very plain language that they will penalize us for.
I'll tell you what they hate about posts that just say "bump" or little else. That's not a conversation. It's barely language at all. It's not even aimed at readers. It's just jostling the machine, and man, they hate that more than anything. It's
worse than spam in their eyes, and if they see more of it than pleases them, they just won't send people here anymore.
As I mentioned before, I've been working in forums since 1988, and the last three I worked for flat out banned low-quality bumps, because they weren't willing to bear the impact of Google's penalties to their businesses. Google's bigger than all of us, and they win these fights, every time. I'm saying this as calmly as I can, but also as seriously as I can.
Low-quality bumps are a potential threat to our ability to keep operating.
I really hope that this isn't sounding scoldy. I swear I don't mean it to. Wrestling with Google has been one of my least favorite parts of working on the web for the last decade or so. This is especially depressing because in their early days, they were one of the
best parts about working on the web. I shouldn't have to think about them, but I don't have the luxury of not.
For now I'll keep doing what I can to keep things moving in the right direction, but if things take a turn, then I'll need to be more proactive about it. All I'm asking in return is to, pretty please, at least
consider giving us
something. A photo. A sound sample. A story. If you don't have any of those (and we certainly don't always), at least make your bump a couple of sentences rather than a couple of words.
We love these instruments, and we mostly at least
like each other LOL so maybe think about what you'd be saying to someone face to face, or to a group of us in person to reopen a conversation. After all, we're here as part of a community. Better posts build communities better than machine-jostling does.
In fact, machine-jostling literally undermines them. We can bear some of it because we have so many high-quality posts across the site, but there is definitely a line, and Google will let us know when we've crossed it. I'd appreciate your help staying out of the penalty box.
So I'm not making "no low-quality bumps" a rule yet, but I'm also not ruling out a rule in the future.
I think these kinds of comments help us to get little glimpses of one another and often can lead to side conversations about mutual interests and even long term communication. It's nice.
THIS, I ADORE. I sometimes look at ukes that I think should be getting more action, and will make a comment to supply a bump myself. That's what I'm talking about. Fostering communication, community, communion, all that good stuff. If we make that our standard for every post, things keep moving in the right direction.
Here's to at least not TALKING about Google for a while, even if I can never go more than an hour or two without thinking about them, which pleases me none at all.
Yr pal,
Tim
Mod
PS. I'm not much of a buyer or seller, and I find that too much time in the marketplace is more than my UAS can handle. I really don't plan to say anything else about this, and agree that that was never the intent of this thread. It's a non-trivial issue, I swear, but I also swear that I'm not going to say anything else about it. LOL
