This shit is so long

Not gonna change. It's for SEO. Give it up. It was shorter until somebody bitched about one group being excluded.

 

It's not an ideal solution to making the site more search-engine friendly, but it is one of the solutions available to us. The nature of this site prevents us from just installing vBSEO as it is and allowing it to make the URL's more search-friendly. There are parts of this site which are inevitably cut off to guests and bots in order to protect the identity of our members, and that will give us less links on search engines as a result of not letting them link to those areas (member profiles, albums, wall messages etc). I don't think it is necessarily unfair to compensate for that loss by optimising the title of this forum so that it includes the keywords that people will be searching for on Google should they need support and advice about LGBT-related issues.

I also echo what Gamer am I said about it affecting the staff. There are parts of the staff features which have been affected by this, such as the link to Admin/ModCP, but it is something we have just had to deal with and get used to. If that forum title allows us to maximise our hits on search engines without needing to submit any member information then that is a very small price to pay in my eyes, and I think it's a setting that most of us feel comfortable with, despite how annoying the title may be.

At the moment it is set up to submit information to Google, and Yahoo also receives submitted links on some days but is a lot more tempermental. We're planning to get Bing set up in the near-future, as far as I know.

I'm not entirely sure how the search-engine bots work so you might need to ask Chip for more information, but the uber-basics that I have gathered from discussions is that there are certain parts of a webpage that Google and search engines focus on than other parts. The title of the forum is one as that is the name that appears when we get a hit on Google, therefore having the title include the keywords for EC will help Google put us on its search engines and increase our positioning on results because of relevancy. If somebody typed in "EmptyClosets" then that would inevitably be one of the top results, whereas now somebody could type "coming out resources" and the keywords within the forum title would allow us to appear as a higher and more relevant result on the results page.

Also, these optimisation settings for SEO aren't just giving us bits of traffic here and there. It was set up on April 8th, and by April 20th unique visits had risen 40% and google searches risen 57%. It has likely risen even more since then so the long link isn't just there to be irritating or give us a couple of more hits. I don't deny that I find it irritating, but it's a small price to pay if the site can be so visible without Google even needing to looking at our membership base and other active areas of the site.

As for the posts, x2y2 nailed it. The overall tone of posts in this thread don't really give a nice vibe, and i think that discussions on any feedback can be done without letting irration get the better of us, which numerous people seem to have let happen. I don't want to patronise you all by saying how we should all be acting, but let's start again and we can discuss the grievances you have with the title without anybody offending anybody else.

I know that there are some of you who find it to be irritating, long, unnecessary and so on, but it is a needed feature if we are to let vBSEO work properly. Seth paid $149 for us to use the feature, therefore the customisation for it does need to be set up adequately so that it isn't a waste of money for him. Sure, the title is long and rather unattractive when we look at it, but it isn't unbearable at the same time. As I've said already, it is a small price to pay to compensate for the privacy issues that we face with member profiles. If the title wasn't doing anything for the search engines then I wouldn't try and justify keeping it, but it is having a great effect as it contains the most vital keywords that people will use when looking for a site like EC.

Martin.

PS. I also apologise if there any spelling mistakes and so forth. I have only just woken up and I didn't expect to be typing out such a long post so early.

 

Not that I am aware of. vBulletin only allows you to type in the homepage name that you want for the site rather than allowing you to customise its display via fonts and sizes etc. It's just a little textbox that you type letters in, rather than the typical postbox that has all the special settings for customising a post with BBcode.

Martin.