BB FANS

this does not affect me personally, but i'm just wondering.

right now out of the 10 users online, 3 of them are apparently registered. the other 2 however, are bots

is this right?. how can a bot register on a forum..

oh, when i say bots, i mean google and stuff.. don't worry- we don't have spammers lol

Good question! phpBB (the forum software) makes Google etc registered users, so that we can give them permissions (in case there are some forums we don't want indexed). If they weren't registered users, we wouldn't then be able to do that.

ah okay then.

so in other words, they are making the forum go up the ranks in the search engine?. (or at least some of them)

when i type bb fans, this is the top link. but it will be interesting if i typed big brother forums. see if it's still the top

Yes, Google spiders (& others) trawl the Internet going through all the sites (they are looking for new sites or updated content) in order to update the search engines. Any site which updates often (like forums & blogs) will have many visits from the Google spiders. It's all very clever!

so can i ask you a question (this stuff is actually quite facinating)

say this forum was actually on page 5/ 6 of the search results, how does it get to the top?

how many visits from google get it to page 1.

or is it based on how many people visit the site

That is a very hard question & if everyone knew the answer to that, all the sites would be on page 1!! The people who know most about it, do it for a living & are called SEO's (search engine optimisers). They are paid to optimise people's sites to get them higher ranking in the search engines. It is a very complex subject.

There are certain things which can be done to increase a site's chances of being higher in the search engines, but I believe that Google has recently changed it's rules & I am not up to date I'm afraid. For example, it did used to be that if you could get a link to your site listed on a higher ranking site, the spider would then follow through that link & go to yours, helping to make your site higher ranked, but recently I have had requests from 2 sites, asking me to stop the spiders from following links in our news articles to their sites, as under Google's new rules it would penalise them. I know nothing about the new rules though, so I don't know what that is about.

The more a site is updated, the more visits from spiders it will get, so for example bloggers who are always adding new articles will be visited more than someone who doesn't update very often. Likewise with the comments - the more they get the better.

With forums, it's not necessarily about the number of members, but more about the number of posts done. An active forum will be higher in the rankings than one which has hardly any posts.

Another thing sites have to think about is what search words they would want people to search in order to reach their site - they then have to make sure those words are repeated a lot on the site (especially the front page). The spiders will then know what search terms to list them for.

It is an extremely complex subject. I think that having a good domain name helps as well - having your search terms in the url.

The top few results in Google are often paid for listings (as are the ones on the right hand side).

all this information is interesting.

i get it.