The sweetest freebies and shopping site in the world!

Hi everyone, my new friends Dave A and Mike54 sent me over here to post my site and ask for some suggestions on how I can make my forum nicer.

http://www.freestuffhotdeals.com/freebies/

This is my only forum site. I love my site. I mean it, I really love it. I'm so proud of it because I made it. That's right, this whole idea is mine. I looked around at other freebies and shopping sites and I wanted to be different and she is! My site is unique in many different ways compared to other sites in this niche and that makes me happy.

I've never done anything like this before so I'm learning as I go. This site is a year and a half old. I transfered from a PHPBB board last April. I really love the vbulletin board. The difference is night and day. Subforums rule!

I would love some suggestions for the index display. If there is anything else that I can do. The forum is MASSIVE and I fear having a huge, long, never ending list of forums. I really like having a short list of forums like I have but it's busy with all of the subforums listed like that on the index. I get very, very, nervous when I start playing around with the forum display. I need help with that. I HATE those stupid yellow new post icons.

As far as how big it is. I would not mind getting rid of the Creative Living forums because nobody but moderators ever post in there but I don't want to lose the content...or maybe I should ditch that forum because all it is is a forum full of articles from other peoples sites and maybe Google hates that? Duplicate information from one site to another?? Then again, what else is a freebies forum? (All articles from other sites are posted with links to those sites.)

The recipes section is HUGE, HUGE, HUGE and I have a moderator who loves posting recipes. I let her do it because i get quite of bit of traffic sailing in from people looking up recipes.

Notice that this forum is like 4 sites in 1. It's a USA, CA, UK and AU site. My husband makes these cool online games (The Hacker Puzzle and The Binky's Adventure Game). They've been passed around all over the internet and that's how I achieved the page rank 5 on the homepage and 4 on the forum. That's also why I'm international. Google made us international and I just went with it. I should have a section for India too but I can't find good Indian affiliates.

My husband made my sidebar banner display for me. It rotates with every refresh. The skin is a free skin that I found. I wanted lavender because nobody else has anything close to it. The skin was for a baby site so he hacked it up, took the babies off the buttons and added the flowers. He made the blog homepage match the forum.

I love the blog homepage. I switched to the blog when we moved the forum from the PHPBB board. The blog is a billboard and I make so much more money with it than I did with the old homepage.

OK, that's it. If you need any more details let me know. :o

I forgot to mention this....

I named the forums according to popular search terms for SEO purposes. Also, if I do something different with the index will that take away from my search engine friendliness? I need to make it as easy as possible for those bots to read the site and index me.

The more I read about SEO the more complicated it gets....

Hehe was not exspecting so much pink/purple.

Hehe was not exspecting so much pink/purple.

Yeah, it's girlie. It's a ladies site. I do have some men who visit but it's definitely a ladies site.

The site looks good. And it appears to be very active, as well.

Overall, I would say you've done well with it. Wait until Peggy sees it. :yes:

The site is obviously working. And there's that saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I did find it hard to read at first, but got used to it. I'm with Mike and am going to pass the buck on design side.

I was suprised to find no robots.txt for what seems to be an effective site.

Actually, I wasn't trying to pass the buck on the design critique. I just think Peggy will like the site.

I'm smiling!!!

Thank you!

I was suprised to find no robots.txt for what seems to be an effective site.

I used to have robots.txt and I went to a search engine site and submitted my site. They (I can't remember which search engine site it was) sent me an email complaining that the robots.txt was compromising their ability to index us so I got scared thinking that I had done something wrong and deleted it.

Was that a bonehead thing to do?

Well, I feel there are some things you really don't need to have indexed. And the bots spend a finite period of time on your site, so why not direct them to your content, rather than to your FAQ?

That message is simply making sure you haven't made a mistake.

For example, if you want your calendar indexed, don't have it excluded through your robots.txt file. But normally there is more valuable content, and that calendar can generate 1000's of pages - most of them of absolutely no SE value.

Get your good content indexed, not the marginal stuff. That is where your SE referred traffic is going to come from.

The other question is do you have an XML site map set up?

Gotcha on the robots.txt. I'll put it back.

I don't have a site map.

I should create a site map. That will be a big job. It wont be hard it will just be HUGE.

Many of us use the vBSEO Site Map Generator, which sends a file to Google and Yahoo on a daily basis. And it seems to work quite well. Check over at .org for it. It's a simple add-on that will really help you out.

Many of us use the vBSEO Site Map Generator, which sends a file to Google and Yahoo on a daily basis. And it seems to work quite well. Check over at .org for it. It's a simple add-on that will really help you out.

NICE!!!

(You guys are so great! Thank you so much for all of the help that you have been giving to me. I think I might be developing a crush on you and Dave A!)

Do you guys have any idea when Peggy will come to the board? I'm interested in hearing her ideas about my index. Also I'm looking for someone to make me a new style. I want something very sleek and professional.

Look at this, I'm totally in love with this. I was going to see if she could do something similar for me. http://www.wrapperscorner.com/ I've tried to write to the people who designed this style but all of my emails were returned.