Save Fireflyfans.net by dreamtrove

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Google page rank is run on number of incoming links, associated with the term firefly, and the activity of those links and the pages that they are on.

It's somewhat expected as more and more sites that link to FFF.NET slowly die away. I'm not sure if there's much we can do to keep the Google ranking up there unless everyone goes around on public forums and provide a link back to us.

Anyone have suggestions?

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Tuesday, March 31, 2009 4:38 PM

CELLARDOOR

I wish there were a "Links" page on "Shiny Universe." Based on the current site build, I don't really see a place to link FFF.net over there. I'm pretty sure I found this place a couple months ago through a Google search, but it might have been from a link from Browncoats.com too...

Does "The Signal" have a links page? I'm not seeing one over there either. Hmm... one thing about Browncoats--we're a persistent bunch (even new ones like me), and I'd be willing to bet they'd click to a second page in search of fellow Browncoats.

That being said, more traffic here sure wouldn't hurt. =\ It'd be nice to have even more people still talking about Firefly/Serenity on a regular basis.

I don't suppose adding it to signatures on forum profiles elsewhere helps, does it? I can add to my signatures easily enough. :)

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Tuesday, March 31, 2009 5:58 PM

XXMONKEYZ

As a new fan of Firefly (I just started and finished the series and the movie last week), I didn't have too much trouble finding these forums using a google search. So rest assured - people will still find this place ;)

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Tuesday, March 31, 2009 6:00 PM

PHOENIXROSE

You think you know--what's to come, what you are. You haven't even begun.

Quote:
Originally posted by xxmonkeyz:
As a new fan of Firefly (I just started and finished the series and the movie last week), I didn't have too much trouble finding these forums using a google search.

Now that is good news. Isn't that good news? Has a kind of poetry to it...

[/sig]

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Tuesday, March 31, 2009 11:24 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Haken:
Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Google page rank is run on number of incoming links, associated with the term firefly, and the activity of those links and the pages that they are on.

It's somewhat expected as more and more sites that link to FFF.NET slowly die away. I'm not sure if there's much we can do to keep the Google ranking up there unless everyone goes around on public forums and provide a link back to us.

Anyone have suggestions?

Absolutely!!

I don't use google, but the same techniques I use on yahoo should apply.
Use the search function on the search engine site. Every time I visit FFF.net I type into yahoo's search fireflyfans, and get the link. I do this for various purposes, including cookie and tracking avoidance.
If I were to work the fff links, I'd also use Firefly and Serenity, anything you want to make linky. Make sure to only click on the result you want increased in rank. I've moved results from 104th or worse up to the top ten - that's just me alone, doing it so others can find things easier. It is not over night, can take weeks, and every 3 months or so the rankings get juggled, as different servers are rotated through, but consistency is rewarded.

I have done this for various car activities, car shows, car clubs, car forums, car info, etc - my car is the only reason I got on the net, really.

If yu have a specific site or thread other than fff.net that you want, because it has a fff linky, also click on that result once every day, and that linky will gain ranking, which should also increase the ranking of fff based on the strength of the linking site. I have noticed that as a correllary. for specific other sites, include both firefly or serenity and also an unusual word or phrase or combination to bring up the site, and eventually it will jump into the plain "firefly" serach results. Sometimes you need to take some time to skim through hundreds of serach results, but then the next day you know approx where to look, and you immediately notice jumps up in result rankings.

If a bunch of us do this, each day, I would think it would be more powerful than just me. I should say that over the years, I have not seen a noticable difference in doing more than once per day, but I do it anyhow for other reasons.

I have seen it work, but I cannot guarantee it works for google.

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009 12:04 AM

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Use the search function on the search engine site. Every time I visit FFF.net I type into yahoo's search fireflyfans, and get the link. I do this for various purposes, including cookie and tracking avoidance.

If yu have a specific site or thread other than fff.net that you want, because it has a fff linky, also click on that result once every day, and that linky will gain ranking, which should also increase the ranking of fff based on the strength of the linking site. I have noticed that as a correllary. for specific other sites, include both firefly or serenity and also an unusual word or phrase or combination to bring up the site, and eventually it will jump into the plain "firefly" serach results. Sometimes you need to take some time to skim through hundreds of serach results, but then the next day you know approx where to look, and you immediately notice jumps up in result rankings.

If a bunch of us do this, each day, I would think it would be more powerful than just me. I should say that over the years, I have not seen a noticable difference in doing more than once per day, but I do it anyhow for other reasons.

Sounds like something worth trying. Thanks!

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009 2:29 AM

LEMMING

Quote:
Originally posted by CellarDoor:

Does "The Signal" have a links page? I'm not seeing one over there either. Hmm... one thing about Browncoats--we're a persistent bunch (even new ones like me), and I'd be willing to bet they'd click to a second page in search of fellow Browncoats.

B]

Not at the moment. We used to, but stuff was going out of date too quickly and we ended up putting a link to the more comprehensive News Of The Verse site instead. Though I am not sure how active or current that is.

This may be something we should re-instate on the new Signal site. It's a work in progress, but I'll suggest that we look at this again.

Nick
( www.serenityfirefly.com)

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009 3:14 AM

JONGSSTRAW

This morning it was on the top of the 3rd page! I know this because I don't have the web address "saved", rather I do a Google search each time to get on FFF. If a few hundred folks a day Googled FFF a few times a day to log on, then the rankings would have to rise. I cannot believe the sites listed in front of FFF would get anywhere near the daily traffic we have, so maybe something else is afoot.

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009 3:47 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Ah yes, the good ole google-roll, worth a try.

Speakin of, now I need *another* set of FF DVDs, loaned em to someone to get em interested, and when I asked when I was gettin em back he says "Molon Labe!", lol.

He's gonna have to get his own copy of the movie tho!

-F

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009 4:09 AM

FARFLY

All the search engines I use (cuil, ask, dogpile, yahoo)except google, had fireflyfans.net on the first page, usually near the top.

I'd put a link on my home page but since it's only had 2800 hits in nine years, mostly from me, it probably wouldn't help.

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009 10:27 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
Ah yes, the good ole google-roll, worth a try.

Speakin of, now I need *another* set of FF DVDs, loaned em to someone to get em interested, and when I asked when I was gettin em back he says "Molon Labe!", lol.

He's gonna have to get his own copy of the movie tho!

-F

Just noticed at bestbuy last weekend firefly set was on sale 19.99. THEY HAVE A SALE ON TIL 4 APR, MYABE IT ENDA THEN./

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Friday, April 3, 2009 5:05 PM

You need to create incoming links to FFF closely associated with the word firefly. Serenity, fff, joss and whedon would be good seconds. Those links are best put on permanent sites with traffic of their own, if people belong to webrings, and want to link back in, encourage other fans to.

Posting a link to fff next to the word firefly as a post signature on multiple sites will have some effect as well, probably a temporary one, but still, maybe worth it.

The problem is not long term, it's really and march-april 2009 problem, it started really in late march, the plummet. FFF fell off in 2009 overall, but lightly. It lost a PR point earlier in the year. Since it held its own 6 years after the show, I don't think it's connected to cancellation.

Haken, traffic is golden, and your best source of SU traffic is FFF, I wouldn't let it go once I had it, unless you know some web voodoo the rest of us don't.

I know this is what matters:

The number of incoming links
the ranking of the sites those links are on
the traffic those pages get
the number of click throughs those links receive
the overall traffic of FFF itself

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Shiny universe is PR4, so Haken knows some voodoo, but it comes up on no dollhouse searches.
FFF has slipped to PR5, so it still outranks SU, while way outstripping it in traffic. Currently it's 18th on a search for "firefly"

btw, searching for fireflyfans probably doesn't help. searching for firefly, and then clicking on this link helps, because it gets registering in the pigeon peck. This is one of the systems that google uses to determine is results list. Another one is that "slip me a fiver." Okay I made that up, but I don't have a better explanation for amazon's page on an item to keep coming up on the top of google searches. I suspect if people want to go to an amazon item page on amazon.com they go to that site.

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Sunday, April 5, 2009 4:32 AM

somebody is doing something right, because it's back up to 5th place.

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Sunday, April 5, 2009 9:47 AM

EMBERS

Quote:
Originally posted by xxmonkeyz:
As a new fan of Firefly (I just started and finished the series and the movie last week), I didn't have too much trouble finding these forums using a google search. So rest assured - people will still find this place ;)

Wow a new fan! Welcome! Check out the link in my signature to see what books, comics and things you still have to enjoy!

New Firefly fans should check this out: http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.asp?b=2&t=15816

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Sunday, April 5, 2009 9:28 PM

Perhaps I was not clear.
My suggestions:
If you want fireflyfans.net to show up highly ranked on a list of search results for firefly, then type in firefly on a search engine, then go find a result which is a link to fff.net, and click on it.
If you want fff.net to rank higher on a result list of a search fro whedon, then type in whedon for the search, and find a link for fff.net and select it.

Do these once per day.
If this isn't what my previous post sounded like, it is what I meant.

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Sunday, April 5, 2009 10:51 PM

SIGMANUNKI

Quote:
Originally posted by Lemming:

Not at the moment. We used to, but stuff was going out of date too quickly and we ended up putting a link to the more comprehensive News Of The Verse site instead. Though I am not sure how active or current that is.

New of the Verse is no more. There were various reasons for its demise. But, the most significant was the fact that there wasn't (and still isn't) enough news in the verse to continue.

Aside: The domain has been picked up by a squatter. I really wish that there were laws to prevent such BS.

----
I am on The Original List (twice). We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"

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Monday, April 6, 2009 12:54 AM

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
somebody is doing something right, because it's back up to 5th place.

Content is king. Site moved up probably because of the April Fools joke and the couple of articles on Dollhouse over the weekend, both of which probably generated inbound links that moved FFF.NET up in the rankings.

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Monday, April 6, 2009 3:12 AM

2BY2GINGERBLUE

When I Google firefly it comes up 5th and has since you first posted. Is it possible that it shows up different for everyone?
Kinda weird huh?

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Monday, April 6, 2009 3:13 AM

2BY2GINGERBLUE

That's page one and 5th down.

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Monday, April 6, 2009 6:15 AM

It was briefly in a state of rapid degeneration as a search for "firefly." I think that JTF and Haken both have points. I've been using JTF's method. This enters into the "pigeon rank" whereas Haken's method enters into the "page rank" system. Both are used by google to determine search results order.

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Monday, April 6, 2009 8:28 AM

ASARIAN

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:

Without google search traffic, the chance of new firefly fans coming here drops off to zero.

I honestly don't think there's anything wrong with fff.net, or the way Haken handles it. It's the 'Verse itself that's dying -- something a good deal more dangerous. :(

--
"Mei-mei, everything I have is right here." -- Simon Tam

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Monday, April 6, 2009 8:49 AM

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
somebody is doing something right, because it's back up to 5th place.

We're at number one now for 'Firefly.' Interesting.

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Monday, April 6, 2009 11:18 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

it's 2nd on my most visited sites.

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Monday, April 6, 2009 4:56 PM

I just got it as fourth. I think this is interesting. I first have to disagree with Asarian. I watch the trending topics and Firefly fandom is on the rise. There was a tremendous spark for libertarianism, and Firefly was widely circulated, also it's been circulated by sci-fi communities online, and additionally, Dollhouse fans have been watching it. It's definitely bigger now than it was two years ago. The same thing happened to Buffy. Buffy last year hit its height at about twice the weekly viewership it ever had when it was on the air. Now it's faded somewhat, but firefly is still going strong. Not as strong as the Colbert Nation, but stronger than Scientology. It's damn good for a show off the air for 6 years that ran half a season. Remember, it's just this sort of thing that kept star trek alive.

Star Trek was off the air for 5 years and still had an avid fan base when it spawned the animated series. After the animated series, Ballantine released the, CMIIW, first line of *new* star trek stories as a series of novels. This carried fandom through another 5 years until there was a movie, brought on by the success of Star Wars. A series of successful movies prompted Star Trek, the Next Generation.

The important parts here are obvious: For five years, Trekkies wandered through the desert. They had novelizations of episodes, etc. but no real new material, but the persistent fanbase demonstrated the market, and while some ideas failed, eventually it became a franchise.

I was able to sus out that in a given week, as many people have watched firefly as have watched any top rated sci-fi show that is currently on, below BSG, but at least as many as watch fringe, etc. That's fairly impressive since it's not only cancelled, but there are a limited number of episodes. So, no, I'd say Firefly is still climbing in popularity.

Of course, this discussion has little to do with the popularity of firefly as a show, since FFF is competing largely with other firefly sites, not with pages devoted to the insect. I'm quite fond of the little buggers, we have them all over the place here. In a couple weeks they'll crawl out as little black and orange triangles on six little legs. It took me years to figure out that they were the same insect, but they are. Distant relative of ladybugs. Anyway. (FF still carries a 9.5 on imdb)

The issue of FFF falling relative to "firefly" search" is an interesting one. It plummeted at some point recently, and continued to do so. I thought maybe Haken wasn't doing something he had been doing. When I came here, it was the number one result for the search, and I migrated from the IMDb board, as I was sick of dealing with all of the anti-'s who just didn't like it because it was derivative of outlaw star et al. For the past year or so, I think it's been pretty much in second place, and most of this year it's been third or fourth.

The idea that our activity kicked it temporarily up to first, and now is seeping back down is very revealing. It's like watching amazon sales rank. (Cheeziest way to get your amazon sales rank to spike: list all your copies for distribution at a penny and make your friends and family buy them, on the same day.) That trick doesn't get you high enough to be worth it thought, it'll only spike you to around 30,000. Maybe 10,000 if you do it right, you need to spike higher than that to get noticed.

I confess I come here less often due to new years resolutions which I have forced myself back to:

1. No politics. It's a waste of time. Sure, everyone has interesting ideas, but none of us has the ability to affect change, and so it's all moot. I'm working for time efficiency.

2. I allow myself one show a day, but with my sound not working, I'm not watching anything. Mostly there's a lot of talk about DH, which I have no interest in. I would watch TSCC, Chuck, Heroes, Kings, if I could, but I can't, and so there's not much to talk about. (I was a little disappointed in the last Kings, a little more soap and a little less alt. hist.) Not to threadjack my own thread.

3. actually get stuff done, so I've been busy with work, two jobs, I'm here to yack if there's something interesting to discuss, but not to argue, honestly, I don't have the time anymore. If someone wants to disagree with me, fine, i concede the point, it's the easiest way out. I do find this SEO stuff interesting, as one of the jobs I'm doing is a web project.

Any further thoughts on why FFF resurged are welcome of course. I do think it was not a random event, that my posting this thread caused a small number of us to act in a way that bumped up the numbers, and maybe Haken did something. It also betrays that it doesn't take a whole lot of action to move something back up.

Oh, I see now that there are other Firefly forums out there. Also some Firefly sites that aren't forums. Maybe we should make a webring. This wouldn't be a terrible idea. I think FF is far from dead. A lot of people called the death of Trek at least 40 years to early.

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Monday, April 6, 2009 6:42 PM

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
I just got it as fourth. I think this is interesting.

Okay, this is really interesting. Google actually returns different result ranking depending on IP, network, etc., when I search for 'Firefly.'

My home computer, which is through our local cable provider, returns FFF.NET at 5th place.

My work computer, which is on the Time Warner network, returns FFF.NET at 1st place.

I'm not exactly sure what this means, but I'm sure it's unfair to someone for sure.

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Monday, April 6, 2009 9:00 PM

SIGMANUNKI

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:

I first have to disagree with Asarian. I watch the trending topics and Firefly fandom is on the rise.

You're mistaking minor perturbations with the overall trend. Overall, Asarian is right. The trend is that this fandom is dying. There is a difference between someone watching a liking something verses someone watching something and becoming a fan adding to the fandoms numbers. The latter is what matters. And it's the latter where the numbers have drastically fallen over just the past couple years.

----
I am on The Original List (twice). We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009 3:13 AM

Re: fandom, anecdotal stuff: more people I knew/met had become firefly fans without my introduction in the last year than previous.

Statistical stuff, twittering firefly is on the rise vs. other shows. This is not surprising. The whole ron paul crowd and anti-fed movement has been passing around firefly.

This sort of thing isn't news either. Look at when fandom for dragonriders took off, or lord of the rings. It's about when it speaks to people, and it speaks to people more now than when it was new.

I've satisfied for myself that firefly is trending up as a subject of interest. I'll admit that dollhouse is trending up, regardless of me not liking it. But for something to increase popularity after its death, like catch 22, is a sleeper, it's not that rare. Buffy, for example.

Most classic example in sci-fi is probably Phillip K. Dick. He had many more fans dead than he ever had alive. The man never really made a dime. Now he's heralded in writer's circles as a luminary.

Van Gogh is okay. I was really fond of his as a child. Some of the paintings both me.

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009 3:56 AM

Haken

I wondered if something like this was happening. Google is selectively returning different results based on your ISP, so it has a different pigeon rank for each server. I'm on frontier DSL, so probably I'm the one kicking it back up, me not being here probably causes it to fall, unless other people here are on the same server.

I can see why they would do this. It's the easiest way to get regional alteration of results. Anyone using Vodaphone for internet access is probably not looking for Chinese Language pages as results.

I wonder when they started doing that. It used to be I would get a large number of european language sites, and now, not so much.

Currently, FFF is 17th for me.

Oh, and some people are missing the point here: Whether firefly is trending up or down is not relevent to the present discussion. This is regarding how haken's site compares in ranking to other firefly sites, not to other TV shows which are not returned on a firefly search. Firefly dominates the "firefly" search results, so this is really how FFF stacks up against direct competitors.

The insect is not really a competitor for its own name here. There is a product firefly cellphone for kids, a few others, but really, almost all the top results are other Firefly/Serenity Whedon-based sites.

I suspect that this interests me and Haken more than the rest of y'all from an internet seo angle, but it's worth figuring out.

Here's my current ranking of results on a google search for firefly, which I now know is specific to my DSL:

1. Firefly (TV series) - Wikipedia
2. Firefly Mobile Phone for Kids
3. "Firefly" (2002) TV - IMDb
4. Firefly | SCIFI.COM
5. Firefly Media Server - an internet radio site
6. Firefly Episode Guide - scifispace.com
7. Firefly: Complete Series on Blu-ray - Amazon
8. BrownCoats.com - a fan site
9. Firefly Studios - a UK fantasy game designer
10. Firefly Free Full Episodes - tv.com
11. FireflyWiki.org - a wiki for the 'Verse
12. Firefly Restaurant - San Francisco
13. Firefly Restaurant - DC
14. Firefly Restaurant - Framingham
15. firef.ly - a browser sync site *
16. Firefly filemanager - a firefox plugin
17. FIREFLYFANS.NET

* browser sync was an idea a few years ago that wouldn't it be neat if you could find out who else was browsing the same page as you somewhere on the web. Neat idea, never took off. People dislike anti-privacy measures even if they lead to interesting conversations, etc. I think that facebook is headed for a fall along these lines. This page is full of broken images, so hasn't been updated in a long time.

Now FireflyWiki also I wanted to note has on their homepage "for the show and *upcoming* movie"

7/10 of the first page are Firefly fan sites, so I think the proposed waning of fandom is not an issue. This is relative to firefly. I also think waning fandom is incorrect, but that's not so relevent.

10/10 results on the first page of a search for "buffy" are Buffy fan sites. This is up from 6/10 when the show was actually on the air, years ago. (And then I was including buffy rpg and ccg sites as fan sites, which shared space with Buffy Tyler and the Buffy-Porson)

Some words have much more competition. Still, Angel holds a lot of the tops spots for "angel" (5/10)

Heroes is giving me (8/12, don't ask, I don't know) for "heroes", another competitive word.

Chuck is 5/10 for "chuck"

Twilight is 9/10 for "twilight" with Stephanie Meyer displacing the Campbell story and the Rod Serling anthology show. But unless something like this happens, you can pretty much expect your name to hold the word, unless it's something really common. the other 1/10 result was for the time of day, twilight.

Overall, there's an obvious couple of things going on here. There might be slippage in firefly dominating firefly searches, but it could be on the rise, all these other guys were there when the show was on the air, except maybe the firefox plugin. Actually, there were pages referencing the insect when the show was on the air. The key is FFF is losing to other fans sites.

The other noticeable trend is the increasing result prominence of media outlet sites over random fansites. FFF is currently 3rd of three independent firefly only sites.

Major media sites are taking over because of the system, which is rigged in their favor, tracking overall traffic, content and page-rank, rather than firefly specific content. This is probably pseudo-nefarios, since this is who is holding shares in GOOG atm. still, other sites are able to manipulate that system. Otherwise, we should examine if FFF fell from first to third on the indy fansite list for everyone else, and if so, why?

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009 8:54 PM

Regarding the rank fluctuation, what I have observed with yahoo search results over the years.

The rank generally stays consisent. At certain intervals, I normally feel it's about every 3-4 months, there is a juggling in the rankings - I will notice that the "new" ranking is actually exactly the same as it was the last time juggling occured. This means that if I've bumped a result up to the top 10, drooping into the teens, and suddenly it's not there, then I know to go to 104th ranked result, because that's where it was the last time juggling happened. I don't know the exact cause, but I figured servers were getting updated, and servers were not synced, and maybe servers which had been off-line for a while were being used while the main servers were having work done (often an older server, with less capacity, or a "known good" database are used when problems occur with the "newest and greatest" equipment). I have noticed during these periods that searching once, and then exiting and searching again can give widely varying results - like I'm getting a different server from one minute to the next. Kinda depends on which one, or how many, are busy at any given moment. I'm always using my work computer, where we have T1 lines.

So this phenomena mentioned for this week or 2 might not be permanent, and I'd be inclined to think it won't be, past the time the work google is doing gets done.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009 5:20 PM

Hmm. Interesting. There may be some internal bias in the servers giving abnormal preference to certain sites, wikipedia, amazon/imdb. I'd guess 114th says that Yahoo! is reloading a lot of old data into its system every time it recalibrates.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009 6:16 PM

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Hmm. Interesting. There may be some internal bias in the servers giving abnormal preference to certain sites, wikipedia, amazon/imdb. I'd guess 114th says that Yahoo! is reloading a lot of old data into its system every time it recalibrates.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine during lunch about the ranking. He said that Google wants to tailor the search results to a specific user, but due to privacy concerns, they haven't been able to do that yet.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009 9:01 PM

SIGMANUNKI

Dreamtrove, you're making the assuming that all that translates into fans. Are you sure that's a good assumption? Because, I really really don't.

I really think that you're hoping is leading to bias in your interpretation of this, so called, data.

----
I am on The Original List (twice). We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009 11:28 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
Dreamtrove, you're making the assuming that all that translates into fans. Are you sure that's a good assumption? Because, I really really don't.

I really think that you're hoping is leading to bias in your interpretation of this, so called, data.

----
I am on The Original List (twice). We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"

Not sure what point you're trying to make. When I do these things it is to make it easier for others to find the link I want them to find if they enter reasonable serach words or phrases. I don't expect to create fans by luring those who enter "Firefly" away from some bug fascination.

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Thursday, April 9, 2009 12:11 AM

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Regarding the rank fluctuation...

Here's something else interesting about the ranking, I've noticed that using 3 different browsers (IE, Firefox, and Safari) to perform a Google search would return 3 different sets of results.

The 3 different results could possibly be due to different cookies for each of the browsers. Regardless, it seems that Google may well indeed be tweaking the results based on a particular user, or in this case, a browser.

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Thursday, April 9, 2009 1:46 AM

JAYNESMANE

I care, but aside from posting links to the site what else can we do?

Isn't the keyword Firefly based on THIS website and not anything we can do? Unless we say Firefly a lot in the forums maybe?

Firefly, firefly, firefly, firefly, Serenity, firefly, firefly....

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Thursday, April 9, 2009 4:58 AM

Haken,

Interesting point. So their current shortcut is to do it by ISP. They might be doing it by isp server as well. Meaning stny.rr.com and san.rr.com may not return the same ranking.

Simga,

I think you're missing the point. This is a discussion about the search for "firefly" which returns almost entirely Firefly fan sites as results. This isn't about the rise or fall of firefly popularity, but about FFF within firefly fan sites, many of which were listed above. It's not that we're at war with other browncoats, but as web developers are genuinely interested in what effects the rankings, and the sudden plummet of FFF in late march might have had something to do with Haken's working on Shiny Universe, I'm not sure, still trying to unravel it.

Haken,

Interesting that you were able to get SU up to PR4 almost instantly, FFF is only PR5, though it used to be higher, which is probably part of the reason. FFF got a downgrade from PR6 to PR5 which probably made it vulnerable.

I'm curious of what you think of the "preferential treatment" theory, which I concede is not my own, but one I picked up from web forums. The basic idea is that google is either directly or through intentional manipulation of the rules featuring "partner sites" as top results, such as wiki, amz, and imdb. The competing theories are that these sites are just very good at manipulating the system, or that these sites are just much higher in traffic.

At any rate, it's fairly useless to have Amazon: Firefly DVD, buy here, as a search result, and while that doesn't happen for me, similar things happen on a lot of searches (free advertising?) But let's face it, this would make google a useless search engine. If I wanted wiki, amz, or imdb results for an item I would go to those sites. Face it, if you don't know those sites, you're probably part of the user base that doesn't know how to use a search engine. (at the very least the population who has never used || in a search.)

JTF

LOL. Sorry SN, but JFT, that was pretty funny.

Haken,

Different browsers returning different results, that's really interesting. Also, the trend towards user specific results. That's going to make this game harder.

Jaynesmane,

Gosh. I don't know. I thought by searching on firefly and selecting this link we would pigeon peck it up, but Haken's saying that effect would be very localized. I guess at this point we should probably really focus on why it's happening, and what the mechanics of SEO and traffic are, not just to keep FFF alive, but for the sake of our future projects, like Shiny Universe.

The fact is that there is a strong tide towards the MSM getting all of the traffic flow, a tide which has to be stemmed. I mean, I dread the day when all search results and traffic just steer you directly to fox.com/whatever. The solution to that ultimately is to better understand the mechanisms of traffic.

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Sunday, April 12, 2009 11:24 PM