What is BoardTracker?

[Hell³]

The short version then.. boardtracker is good! ;)


Care to elaborate?

Welcome to the forum.Yeah, I mean, I know you elaborated a lot in those 11 pages but something in between the two versions would be nice.

[b2w]

Yeah, I mean, I know you elaborated a lot in those 11 pages but something in between the two versions would be nice.

Yes, please... :p. I only remember the negative comments (sorry) about the tracker tracking and displaying information from hidden forums and what not. I'm sure that thread over at TAZ has grown, but I can't read all ot that stuff again.

[Noppid]

I'm confused? Did I say something about this in the past? I know I have a strong opinion about tracking software that I may have shared in the past, but I can't recall if it was about this service in praticular.

Who you guys talking to, me or him. I'm so confused.

[b2w]

I'm confused? Did I say something about this in the past? I know I have a strong opinion about tracking software that I may have shared in the past, but I can't recall if it was about this service in praticular.

Who you guys talking to, me or him. I'm so confused.

We're talking to and about Board Tracker. He made one post here today. :)

[Noppid]

Cool, I was curious about his service and eager to share my opinion of course. But I wanted to allow him to tell about his wares before I lumped the service into the generic basket.

[b2w]

Cool, I was curious about his service and eager to share my opinion of course. But I wanted to allow him to tell about his wares before I lumped the service into the generic basket.

:p

[BoardTracker]

Ok, the slightly longer (but not too long) version of why boardtracker is good.. ;)

#1 We notify boards by email in advance before they are spidered - I don't know of any other search engine that does this but board admins asked for it so we do it.

#2 BoardTracker doesn't spider your private forums - unless you want to - many boards do ask for this since it brings more members in who have to register to view the threads they find through boardtracker where only a small snippet was shown.

You have full control over exactly which forums are spidered and can even exclude specific forums with your robots.txt file. We also provide an admin panel on boardtracker which shows you exactly which forums will be spidered. Using the panle you can set which category each forum should belong to and you also get some stats and graphs.

#3 BoardTracker provides a number of mods you can install on your board such as tags with tagclouds and a board search replacement mod - this one is particularly popular on big boards since it takes away a lot of server load normally caused by the built in board search and it is fully integrated so the results appear within your board.. here's an example..

http://forum.rpg.net/searchbt.php

#4 BoardTracker sends you traffic and members as you can see from these..

http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/member.php?u=56200 - Referrals: 1,306
http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/member.php?u=32220 - Referrals: 220
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/member.php?u=59211 - Referrals: 325

#5 Since BoardTracker is designed specifically for boards it is much more efficient at spidering threads and does not just trawl through every page on your site over and over again and it doesn't go following every link there, it only spiders thread related data and ignores everything else.

#6 We are always here to answer your questions and welcome feedback.. you can contact us by email, IM or on our support forums.

You can read much more about BT on our FAQ here..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/

:cool:

[b2w]

Ok, the slightly longer (but not too long) version of why boardtracker is good.. ;)

#1 We notify boards by email in advance before they are spidered - I don't know of any other search engine that does this but board admins asked for it so we do it.

#2 BoardTracker doesn't spider your private forums - unless you want to - many boards do ask for this since it brings more members in who have to register to view the threads they find through boardtracker where only a small snippet was shown.

You have full control over exactly which forums are spidered and can even exclude specific forums with your robots.txt file. We also provide an admin panel on boardtracker which shows you exactly which forums will be spidered. Using the panle you can set which category each forum should belong to and you also get some stats and graphs.

#3 BoardTracker provides a number of mods you can install on your board such as tags with tagclouds and a board search replacement mod - this one is particularly popular on big boards since it takes away a lot of server load normally caused by the built in board search and it is fully integrated so the results appear within your board.. here's an example..

http://forum.rpg.net/searchbt.php

#4 BoardTracker sends you traffic and members as you can see from these..

http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/member.php?u=56200 - Referrals: 1,306
http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/member.php?u=32220 - Referrals: 220
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/member.php?u=59211 - Referrals: 325

#5 Since BoardTracker is designed specifically for boards it is much more efficient at spidering threads and does not just trawl through every page on your site over and over again and it doesn't go following every link there, it only spiders thread related data and ignores everything else.

#6 We are always here to answer your questions and welcome feedback.. you can contact us by email, IM or on our support forums.

You can read much more about BT on our FAQ here..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/

:cool:


OK sounds good, but what if I don't know how to do the bolded part in the quote?? ^^^

[BoardTracker]

OK sounds good, but what if I don't know how to do the bolded part in the quote?? ^^^

How to use robots.txt is explained here..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/#robots

We send board admins details on how to activate and use the account on boardtracker.

Also once you login and see the list of your forums you can simply contact us to request certain forums be removed (or added).

As I said anyway we are always available to answer questions if you are stuck with anything.

[b2w]

How to use robots.txt is explained here..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/#robots

We send board admins details on how to activate and use the account on boardtracker.

Also once you login and see the list of your forums you can simply contact us to request certain forums be removed (or added).

As I said anyway we are always available to answer questions if you are stuck with anything.

OK one more thing. What is the turn around time for customer service to answer my questions. I'm one of those board admins who is new to SEO and I only have about 6 good months of experience with vBulletin and my host and what not. How long should I expect to get an answer to my question after sending an email?

[BoardTracker]

OK one more thing. What is the turn around time for customer service to answer my questions. I'm one of those board admins who is new to SEO and I only have about 6 good months of experience with vBulletin and my host and what not. How long should I expect to get an answer to my question after sending an email?

Usually the same day, depending on what time of day you send the email.

[b2w]

Usually the same day, depending on what time of day you send the email.

OK thank you! :D

[Hell³]

I have another questions, I seem to remember that we had to install code in our site for boardtracker to work, maybe I'm confusing you with some other similar service, is this true?, or you only spider my forums as any other search engine?

What's the advantage of boardtracker for my SEO?, I've seen this:

#4 BoardTracker sends you traffic and members as you can see from these..

http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/member.php?u=56200 - Referrals: 1,306
http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/member.php?u=32220 - Referrals: 220
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/member.php?u=59211 - Referrals: 325
But personally I haven't heard yet a regular web user to say, "hey I have to find this info maybe I should use boardtracker to find it somewhere in all those forums". I know you're moderately or even widely known in the forum admins comunity, but I would want to really know how much in the general comunity.

[BoardTracker]

I have another questions, I seem to remember that we had to install code in our site for boardtracker to work, maybe I'm confusing you with some other similar service, is this true?, or you only spider my forums as any other search engine?

What's the advantage of boardtracker for my SEO?, I've seen this:

But personally I haven't heard yet a regular web user to say, "hey I have to find this info maybe I should use boardtracker to find it somewhere in all those forums". I know you're moderately or even widely known in the forum admins comunity, but I would want to really know how much in the general comunity.

There's nothing you need to install, it spiders like any other search engine only more efficiently since its designed for boards.

Since traffic from boardtracker is highly targeted (with categories and tags for example) it is much more likely to convert to members on your board and also most of our users are already familiar with boards so are better than 'normal' surfers from regular search engines.

Also boardtracker is a 'persistent search (http://blog.boardtracker.com/viewtopic.php?t=142)' engine meaning users can define search terms and we alert them via email or IM whenever a thread matching their interests is posted on any forum we track - this brings you targeted traffic without them even having to actively look for anything. Similarlly we provide searchable rss feeds for users to subscribe to providing yet another way for them to find interesting topics on your board whenever posted.

Additionally there are meta search engines like gada.be/tagjag.com that use our feeds so quite a lot of users we send to boards don't even know that they are going through boardtracker.

[Noppid]

The real question here is, what's in it for you at board tracker?

As pointed out, board admins know about you, so what. The average user does not know you exist. Yeah, they can go to the search page and search my forum, but why should we bother with that search engine? There is no way no how it can be better the the local built in vBulletin search.

It seems like you get alot of backlinks and draw our members to your site when the bottom line is we want them on our own forum and not to leave.

The old saying, "if it sounds too good to be true..." may apply here. I don't see how this is a benefit to anyone but you.

What about duplicate contact. I know for sure that major search engines won't trigger that, but I gotta say, our content on your site would certainly seem like a good way to trigger dupe content filters. If not, why wouldn't it?

The number 3 example is 325 referals aint great, what's the average? There is no data on conversions however. What's the actual average referral rate? What is the conversion rate? How would I know I converted a board tracker visitor that found my site? Throw away the high referral in number 1 example when you calcualte the average referral rate please. Better yet, is this info available public?

Why would this be better then the archive? Why would this be better then the local vB search? Why couldn't a site use any of the many open source search engines that can be installed local and not require a plethora of outbound links to you? Why is this better then google site search? Surely you can't be a better solution then google?

As for the notifications, why should my members be members of your service to get notifications I can give them with the vB thread subscriptions system?

I got pleanty more questions as well as solutions for those that may see things the same as I do, but let's start there.

thanks for your time.

[Peggy]

very interesting...

[b2w]

Noppid, you have got my head spinning. lol

Can someone make this boardtracker it's own thread? please?

[Noppid]

Noppid, you have got my head spinning. lol

Can someone make this boardtracker it's own thread? please?

Someone has to ask the hard questions. Services like this, and similar, are available net wide. Most new webmasters jump on them. But experienced webmasters question them and never use them.

That however is your decision. But with all the FACTS on the table, you can make an informed decision. :)

I'll split the thread. ;)

[b2w]

Someone has to ask the hard questions. Services like this, and similar are available net wide. Most new webmasters jump on them. But experienced webmasters question them and never use them.

That however is your decision. But with all the FACTS on the table, you can make an informed decision. :)

I'll split the thread. ;)

I don't know enough about it to use it and I've learned my lesson back in February not to jump on everything. I usually have to read things like 10 times before I do anything to make sure I understand. And I'm learning from you so ask all of the good stuff, I'm here taking it all in. :)

[Noppid]

I don't know enough about it to use it and I've learned my lesson back in February not to jump on everything. I usually have to read things like 10 times before I do anything to make sure I understand. And I'm learning from you so ask all of the good stuff, I'm here taking it all in. :)

When we posed similar questions to the guy hawking zinks, he disappeared. The internet is an interesting place. If P.T. Barnum was still alive, I bet he'd be the internet king pin! :D

[Peggy]

Tanya, follow my lead. I stay behind Noppid and Joey. If they question a product or hack or a code, I don't use it unless I know for a fact that they are wrong

(and that's only happened once in a year) ;)

[Noppid]

Tanya, follow my lead. I stay behind Noppid and Joey. If they question a product or hack or a code, I don't use it unless I know for a fact that they are wrong

(and that's only happened once in a year) ;)

Yesterday was a bad day. :p

But you gave me some good advice. ;)

[b2w]

When we posed similar questions to the guy hawking zinks, he disappeared. The internet is an interesting place. If P.T. Barnum was still alive, I bet he'd be the internet king pin! :D


:p ...we need more smilies here because I'm actually crying over here!! I had to re-read that and while I was I said to myself, "did he just refer to...as?...okey dokey."

[b2w]

Tanya, follow my lead. I stay behind Noppid and Joey. If they question a product or hack or a code, I don't use it unless I know for a fact that they are wrong

(and that's only happened once in a year) ;)

I'm taking your advice as always Peggy. :)

[Noppid]

:p ...we need more smilies here because I'm actually crying over here!! I had to re-read that and while I was I said to myself, "did he just refer to...as?...okey dokey."


It's nice to know we're not only informative, but entertaining. hehe

The z was actually a d at first, but I thought that might be too obscure and the joke lost.

[Peggy]

lol...... I'm so glad you're in a better mood today noppid :p

[b2w]

It's nice to know we're not only informative, but entertaining. hehe

The z was actually a d at first, but I thought that might be too obscure and the joke lost.

That is hularious. lol

[BoardTracker]

My tip of the day: when writing a long reply make sure to save progress regularly (in notepad or whatever) - my browser crashed just before I finished replying to this and of course I lost it all.. :eek:

Anyway, here I go again.. ;)



The real question here is, what's in it for you at board tracker?
Same thing thats in it for google or any other search engine. :)


As pointed out, board admins know about you, so what. The average user does not know you exist. Yeah, they can go to the search page and search my forum, but why should we bother with that search engine? There is no way no how it can be better the the local built in vBulletin search.
Well as you can see from those links I posted earlier people do use boardtracker to find and register to boards - I don't think all those refs are board admins.. ;) Anyway I think you are confusing our search mod with our standalone search engine.. the traffic we send to boards is nothing to do with the search mod which you dont have to install at all.

Naturally we are smaller than google but we are growing and carving out a place for board search just as search engines like technorati or blogpulse are providing search for blogs. As our traffic grows, so the boards in our index benefit from increased traffic and membership.


It seems like you get alot of backlinks and draw our members to your site when the bottom line is we want them on our own forum and not to leave.
What backlinks? There are none at all. We wont complain if anyone does link to us but no links are required to be listed in boardtracker anymore than they are to be listed in google.



The old saying, "if it sounds too good to be true..." may apply here. I don't see how this is a benefit to anyone but you.
You get fresh traffic and new members. Isn't that a benefit? Its the same as being listed in google or yahoo.


What about duplicate contact. I know for sure that major search engines won't trigger that, but I gotta say, our content on your site would certainly seem like a good way to trigger dupe content filters. If not, why wouldn't it?
Why would it? We don't duplicate your content on our site, we simply generate a small snippet from the first post in a thread same as most search engines. In fact many other search engines DO duplicate your content (google included) by presenting a local cached copy of entire pages of your site.. we don't do anything like that.



The number 3 example is 325 referals aint great, what's the average?
Those are for actual registrations, not just referred visitors. Its free traffic and members for you - is that a bad thing? Also bear in mind most boards in boardtracker have only been listed by us for a few months or a not much more than a year for some, whereas google has been around for 6 or 7 years. I have no idea what the average is, most boards do not report their signup data to us.


There is no data on conversions however. What's the actual average referral rate? What is the conversion rate?
Only the boards themselves can know their conversion stats.


How would I know I converted a board tracker visitor that found my site?
Assuming you use vbulletin (since you are on this site I think its a safe assumption ;) ) you have a built in referrer tracking system as you can see from those links I posted earlier - those show our user account on the boards and the signups generated by the traffic we sent them.



Why would this be better then the archive? Why would this be better then the local vB search? Why couldn't a site use any of the many open source search engines that can be installed local and not require a plethora of outbound links to you?
You're talking about the search mod now? There is a difference between boardtracker the search engine and our search mod - you dont have to use our search mod to be listed in boardtracker at all. BoardTracker existed long before we developed the search mod.

As to why the mod is better than the local vb search - when your board gets big your servers will struggle. vB is a (very good) board software, but it is not a search engine nor should it try to be. Our search mod doesn't replace all features of vb search (yet) but it provides a fast, very relevant and advanced search system with NO LOAD on your servers at all and it can co-exist with the vb search - you can have both. This is one reason many very big boards are using it now.. these are not 'newbie webmasters' these are very experienced and highly successful board admins.. for example one of those boards is owned by a post doctorate researcher in the field of semantic web, online communities and social networks - you couldn't get much further from 'newbie status' as him!



Why is this better then google site search? Surely you can't be a better solution then google?
Google is a general search engine, not a board search. It is simply not designed for indexing boards. A key example of how boardtracker is better than google for boards is that content on boards is time sensitive - its not much use if googlebot finds a thread and indexes it 6 months after it was posted! BoardTracker will find it often within minutes of it being posted and it will be indexed and searchable (and alerts will be sent out) immediately - this is a very important difference. Google even understands this which is why they launched their own blogsearch instead of just relying on their general search.. blogs present unique features that require a unique solution, just as boards do.

Also BoardTracker is better than google in terms of coverage - typically you will find only 10% or 20% of a boards threads indexed in google and often only months after the were posted. BoardTracker can index just about all threads, providing the most complete coverage available.. no other search engine comes even close in that sense.

Another advantage BoardTracker has is that it only indexes the thread data and ignores all other pages and content on a board.. other search engines simply suck up entire pages including all your other links, images, ads, navigation and other surrounding text all of which causes relevance when searching to drop significantly. Also our spider 'knows' which threads are new and only reads those on each visit whereas normal search engine spiders will trawl through every page and follow every link over and over again.


A feature of our mods (which as I say are entirely optional and not at all required to be listed in boardtracker) is that they provide ways for you to network your board with others. This can be other boards you own or boards belonging to other people. Basically our mods provide ways for you to trade traffic and raise awareness of your boards among board users elsewhere.. this is a common practice in the blogosphere and one of the reasons why blogs are so successful - call it the "web2.0" way if you like. Again its optional, even if you choose to use our mods you can still choose not to network with other boards even though it is actually a good thing to network.. you shouldn't fear losing members to other boards since first of all traffic is multiway - you gain new traffic as well - plus your members are perfectly able to use google or any other search engine to find other boards anyway and they will do exactly that.

I think it was Ford who said words to the effect of "don't worry about what your competition is doing, concentrate on what you are doing" - in other words, make your board a place your members will want to stay in and don't worry about other boards they may see.. offer the best possible experience to your users and they will reward you by staying with you - 'hiding' other boards from your members is actually detracting from your users experience in the long run. Also understand that there is no reason at all why board users can't be members of multiple boards - its quite common actually.



As for the notifications, why should my members be members of your service to get notifications I can give them with the vB thread subscriptions system?
Alerts are for NEW threads, not replies to existing threads the user already replied to or chose to subscribe to.. a completely different thing.


I got pleanty more questions as well as solutions for those that may see things the same as I do, but let's start there.

Fire away! ;)

[Hell³]

In paper it all sounds nice, but I believe the question remains, how are you making yourself more available to general public?. I may not ask for specific marketing strategies but generally how the populace is going to get to know boardtracker?

[BoardTracker]

In paper it all sounds nice, but I believe the question remains, how are you making yourself more available to general public?. I may not ask for specific marketing strategies but generally how the populace is going to get to know boardtracker?

I wont reveal details on marketing, suffice it to say it is in our interests to grow our traffic and it is growing.

[b2w]

I wont reveal details on marketing, suffice it to say it is in our interests to grow our traffic and it is growing.

Will it eventually cost me money to join Board Tracker in the near future? They may put some pressure on me to think about this more.

[BoardTracker]

Will it eventually cost me money to join Board Tracker in the near future? They may put some pressure on me to think about this more.

Nope. It will always be free.. unless google and yahoo start charging then maybe we will consider it too. ;)

[Noppid]

I think you got big one's comparing your service to google.

Google does not go around trying to get people to submit their sites. Google does nothing that you do. Yes, it has services, but Matt Cutts aint running around trying to sign people up. That's just too funny IMO.

I can't even find the words right now for how rediculous that sounded comparing this to google. I have to have a beer and try and reply to the rest later.

Help! I've fallen and I can't reach my beer!

[BoardTracker]

I think you got big one's comparing your service to google.

Google does not go around trying to get people to submit their sites. Google does nothing that you do. Yes, it has services, but Matt Cutts aint running around trying to sign people up. That's just too funny IMO.

I can't even find the words right now for how rediculous that sounded comparing this to google. I have to have a beer and try and reply to the rest later.

Help! I've fallen and I can't reach my beer!

Not sure I follow you.. google doesn't do any marketing? I think you will find they do plenty.. billions of dollars worth in fact.. they 'run around trying to get people to signup' more than just about any other. Case in point - they just agreed to pay myspace $900M - thats a whole lot of running around.

And why should I not compare it to google? Fundamentally BoardTracker is a search engine and Google is a search engine.. what should I compare it to? Socks? :p

The fact is, as I explained, Google is NOT designed for boards.. ask them and they will tell you the same.. just (as I also said) Google is NOT designed for blogs which is why they built a blog search engine. BoardTracker IS design for boards from the ground up and so it IS better in that sense.. of course google is bigger, so is the BBC but they are also not a board search engine.

Really you should look a little deeper and see how boardtracker works for boards compared to google and you will see significant differences and benefits.

[Noppid]

I've seen enough. I think this is just a scheme. But that's me. I'm sure for everyone of me there are 10 that think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Google runs a professional show and what you can marketing, google calls spam.

You sound like a good salesman. Good luck. But I can't and won't endorse this at this point.

For google to go public, they put all their marketing on the table for the SEC and the investors. You ran from the question. Why the need to be secretive about that?

[BoardTracker]

I've seen enough. I think this is just a scheme. But that's me. I'm sure for everyone of me there are 10 that think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Google runs a professional show and what you can marketing, google calls spam.

You sound like a good salesman. Good luck. But I can't and won't endorse this at this point.

For google to go public, they put all their marketing on the table for the SEC and the investors. You ran from the question. Why the need to be secretive about that?

"Scheme"?? I think you are jumping to (the wrong) conclusions without really looking at all. Do you think boardtracker is run by some kid in his bedroom at weekends? It is not, it is owned by a serious and professional company.. being smaller than google does not make us any less professional.

"Spam"? What spam do you refer to?

Seriously, you don't expect any company to reveal their marketing details do you? There is no 'running away', there is common business sense.

As for google - they were in business for many years and already worth hundreds of millions before going public and disclosing any such details and even now they are known for being very secretive, nothing is revealed that they are not legally obliged to reveal and never before they have to.. the same applies to any serious company.

[b2w]

Is Board Tracker the same company as http://www.boardreader.com/aboutus.asp? A guy I know who has his own board has this up as one of his Supporters. I just found this. Are there other engines out there like yours or is yours it and the biggest? I'm trying to see if their are other options and if so, how does yours compare? This board reader looks to be down atm...not sure why. *shrugs*

[Hell³]

Well, the thing is, I know there must be hundreds of non specialized search engines going around the web right now, so besides beign specifically targeted at message boards and beign buzzword compliant (sorry the "persistant search" term made it irresistible), what's gonna make web users go and put a search term in your search box instead google's or yahoo's or even ask.com? What's gonna prevent that boardtracker becomes just one more search engine?

What I see as a fail here is that there is the non verbal assumption that web users should be message board users and will use boardtracker since they want to find the information specifically in a forum, and I couldn't begin to fathom why, since while I love forums the great majority clearly suck at beign reliable sources, unless you take the time to sit and register and put in your question yourself. Google may have created a specialized search, but blogs aren't message boards, and while in the main post in a blog may be the really juicy information, who is to say that in the 7th or 50th page of a thread may be the info I am looking for?.

Those are some of the things that my mind asks about your specialized search engine.

[BoardTracker]

Is Board Tracker the same company as http://www.boardreader.com/aboutus.asp? A guy I know who has his own board has this up as one of his Supporters. I just found this. Are there other engines out there like yours or is yours it and the biggest? I'm trying to see if their are other options and if so, how does yours compare? This board reader looks to be down atm...not sure why. *shrugs*

Boardreader is another company, nothing to do with us.

BoardTracker is currently the biggest and most advanced of the board search engines

[BoardTracker]

Well, the thing is, I know there must be hundreds of non specialized search engines going around the web right now, so besides beign specifically targeted at message boards and beign buzzword compliant (sorry the "persistant search" term made it irresistible), what's gonna make web users go and put a search term in your search box instead google's or yahoo's or even ask.com? What's gonna prevent that boardtracker becomes just one more search engine?

What I see as a fail here is that there is the non verbal assumption that web users should be message board users and will use boardtracker since they want to find the information specifically in a forum, and I couldn't begin to fathom why, since while I love forums the great majority clearly suck at beign reliable sources, unless you take the time to sit and register and put in your question yourself. Google may have created a specialized search, but blogs aren't message boards, and while in the main post in a blog may be the really juicy information, who is to say that in the 7th or 50th page of a thread may be the info I am looking for?.

Those are some of the things that my mind asks about your specialized search engine.

BoardTracker is designed for boards and board users.. it provides a type of search not readily available elsewhere. The fact is people already do use it to search and we have already referred many thousands of new members to the boards.

While boardtracker may well be buzzword compliant, it is so only in as much as it provides useful features which our users actually like. We were offering 'persistent search' services long before we ever heard of that particular term - we just called them alerts and they were always popular with our users even though most of them probably never heard that term either.

BoardTracker does not aim to be the next Google, it is not a general search engine and never will be. It does aim to be (and in fact already is) the leading search engine for boards and will provide the best possible service for people wishing to search boards and there are many who do.

As for finding what you want on the 7th page of a thread - assuming the thread stayed on topic (which it should if moderated correctly - just as this one was split from the other when it went off topic) then the first post in the thread usually contains all you need to know to match with what you search for anyway.

[Darwa]

I can't see boardtracker doing any harm, so I've signed up.

I'll let you guys know how it goes.

[Hell³]

I can't see boardtracker doing any harm, so I've signed up.

I'll let you guys know how it goes.Since most of my questions have been adressed, thanks for that mr. BoardTracker (sorry, I don't really know how'd you like to be adressed), I'll be looking forward to your feedback Darwa :)

[b2w]

Noppid, in a nutshell, what do you think about Board Tracker? Is it a helpful SEO tool to use?

[BoardTracker]

Noppid, in a nutshell, what do you think about Board Tracker? Is it a helpful SEO tool to use?

Well before Noppid answers I must point out that boardtracker is not an SEO tool at all.. it is a search engine.

[Noppid]

Well before Noppid answers I must point out that boardtracker is not an SEO tool at all.. it is a search engine.


It most certainly is for the boardtracker site and I maintain that that is it's only use and that it is of no use to a forum owner with experience.

[b2w]

Well before Noppid answers I must point out that boardtracker is not an SEO tool at all.. it is a search engine.

That was scary! :p

The people here help me out A LOT so their opinions mean a lot to me. I will do more reading and once I become more experienced Admin I'll decide what I'll do.

I looked at your site and I see that a lot of sites are joining up. Kudos to you! :)

[BoardTracker]

It most certainly is for the boardtracker site and I maintain that that is it's only use and that it is of no use to a forum owner with experience.

Then in this case you are incorrect. SEO means Search Engine Optimization.. BoardTracker IS a search engine. In what way is it an SEO tool? There is probably some SEO benefit to board owners in the sense that being in boardtracker means lots of links going to their board from our search engine. But by that reasoning you could say Google is also an SEO tool.

Those 'forum owners with no experience' you mention that are in boardtracker and even use boardtracker mods are some of the biggest and most successful board owers around.. I am talking about boards with millions of posts and many years of experience. They must be doing something right. ;)

Its important to understand that being in boardtracker means traffic goes FROM boardtracker TO the boards and NOT the other way around. There are usually no links on boards going FROM boards TO boardtracker. No links TO boardtracker are required to have your board listed in boardtracker.

You may be interested to read this post by the owner of a very big board about our search mod also..

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showpost.php?p=988043&postcount=36

:cool:

[BoardTracker]

I looked at your site and I see that a lot of sites are joining up. Kudos to you! :)

The biggest problem we have now is keeping up with the demand.. ;)

[Joeychgo]

Well, my biggest question is why does a board have to register the boardtracker bot - why cant you just crawl?

[Noppid]

1) Then in this case you are incorrect. SEO means Search Engine Optimization.. BoardTracker IS a search engine. In what way is it an SEO tool? There is probably some SEO benefit to board owners in the sense that being in boardtracker means lots of links going to their board from our search engine. But by that reasoning you could say Google is also an SEO tool.

2) Those 'forum owners with no experience' you mention that are in boardtracker and even use boardtracker mods are some of the biggest and most successful board owers around.. I am talking about boards with millions of posts and many years of experience. They must be doing something right. ;)

3) Its important to understand that being in boardtracker means traffic goes FROM boardtracker TO the boards and NOT the other way around. There are usually no links on boards going FROM boards TO boardtracker. No links TO boardtracker are required to have your board listed in boardtracker.

4) You may be interested to read this post by the owner of a very big board about our search mod also..

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showpost.php?p=988043&postcount=36

:cool:

1) I have a big problem with your continuous assertions that your system can be compared to google. It's nothing like google despite you wanting to grow to that level one day. As poited out, google will find you and likey index a site without having to register and such. So no, you are not like google in any way shape or form except in as much as your call your system a "search engine". Where is the search part on your systems behalf if it can't find sites without opting in?

And back to the point, there is a huge advantage to making these new admins think they are so great for linking back to you and that it will "help" them. Are you telling me backlinks don't help "you" and that backlinks are not a part of SEO?

2) Yeah, I think, and I didn't look, those are people in your "club"? Of course they are and it's probably mutually beneficial to both you and them to hawk your wares. I don't see google having club members posting reviews to assert how great they are, that just happens on it's own with no solicitation necessary. And google certainl don't run around looking for them when they occur to post them in a self serving manner.

3) So what, no one knows you exist but admins. Admin traffic is useless. They may come have a look, but I bet it's meerly to get ideas from other admins as to how they could compete better using ideas garnered from visiting those sites. It's not repeat traffic and rarely converts a member and I bet never results in ad revenue.

4) Testimonials are as good as press releases. They serve one purpose, to make you look good and I bet you would never link to this thread and risk the possibility of it discrediting your advertising push. :eek:

[BoardTracker]

1) I have a big problem with your continuous assertions that your system can be compared to google. It's nothing like google despite you wanting to grow to that level one day. As poited out, google will find you and likey index a site without having to register and such. So no, you are not like google in any way shape or form except in as much as your call your system a "search engine". Where is the search part on your systems behalf if it can't find sites without opting in?

And back to the point, there is a huge advantage to making these new admins think they are so great for linking back to you and that it will "help" them. Are you telling me backlinks don't help "you" and that backlinks are not a part of SEO?

2) Yeah, I think, and I didn't look, those are people in your "club"? Of course they are and it's probably mutually beneficial to both you and them to hawk your wares. I don't see google having club members posting reviews to assert how great they are, that just happens on it's own with no solicitation necessary. And google certainl don't run around looking for them when they occur to post them in a self serving manner.

3) So what, no one knows you exist but admins. Admin traffic is useless. They may come have a look, but I bet it's meerly to get ideas from other admins as to how they could compete better using ideas garnered from visiting those sites. It's not repeat traffic and rarely converts a member and I bet never results in ad revenue.

4) Testimonials are as good as press releases. They serve one purpose, to make you look good and I bet you would never link to this thread and risk the possibility of it discrediting your advertising push. :eek:


1. We are a search engine, just as google is a search engine. Your inability to see that does not change the facts. How about you try some searches..

http://www.google.com/search?q=vbulletin
http://www.boardtracker.com/search/?search=vbulletin

Sure looks like a search engine to me.. and no doubt to everyone else.

As a matter of fact we do seek out boards to add on our own, you don't have to submit your board to be found but obviously its quicker if you do. You seem to think google is somehow different when they are not - they are a "search engine" just as all other search engines like yahoo, msn, altavista, infoseek, shopping.com, technorati and many many others that have come and gone over the years.. there are variations on the theme but they are still search engines even if you are somehow unable to recognize that fact.. anyway do you really think google has no submit url page? Every search engine has one.. perhaps you are new to webmastering and never actually saw such a thing?? Here, take a look..
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Again it seems I have to tell you - BOARDS DO NOT HAVE TO LINK TO US to be indexed by boardtracker, we never even ask for such a thing - why do you keep claiming otherwise? If you honestly believe otherwise then I suggest you actually submit your board and see how the system works.. its better for you to learn about the system before judging it so you can speak from a position of knowledge.

2. Not sure what "club" you refer to, BoardTracker isn't a club. It seems you refuse to believe facts we present to you and you refuse to believe the word of very respected, experienced and successful board owners. That is entirely your choice but ultimately your loss.

3. Where do you get that idea from? You can see on many vbulletin boards out there that traffic we send them does convert to members.. you think those referer stats are not real? You worry its not enough? You think we somehow should send you more members even though every one of them cost you nothing since its entirely from traffic we send? You think they are all admins that signup? You think hundreds of admins register to a board to 'have a look'?! Your objections make no sense I'm afraid.

4. Testimonials posted by well known and respected board owners on another site which we have no control over should mean something. Press releases are sent by a company itself, to promote itself and are completely different. We are quite happy for anyone to read this thread or the one on TAZ or any other talking about BoardTracker since we always take the time to explain and answer questions posted by all board owners and users, even those like yourself who for unknown reasons refuse to believe anything we (or even other board owners) say and apparently don't even take the time to try it and actually learn about the system before making baseless claims.

In fact you can even SEARCH on BoardTracker and find the thread from TAZ and when this board is indexed this very thread will be there too.. so there goes that idea.. ;)

My recommendation to all board owners is to try boardtracker for yourself so you can see exactly how it works and draw your own conclusions.

As always we are available to answer any questions posted here or on our own support forums or by email or IM and we welcome constructive feedback.

:)

[Noppid]

You are a serach index, that's all you are. Until you have a crawler that can work on it's own, that's all you will be.

You are also a niche search index in as much as you only want bulletin boards in the index.

Those two things seperate you very far from the engines you claim you are exactly like.

TAZ? I knew the club mentality was there and that proves it.

I'm sorry you are getting annoyed that I will take your assertions and show the lack of truth in them. Repeating yourself over and over will not make those statements true either.

But your dilligence is noted.

Thanks

[BoardTracker]

Well, my biggest question is why does a board have to register the boardtracker bot - why cant you just crawl?

There are a number of reasons..

It allows us to sync the timezones on all boards no matter where they are - we simply set our user account to GMT on every board which means all threads appearing in our search are in the right time in relation to each other.

It prevents board software from creating and storing countless 'guest' sessions each time our spider visits - when using an account only a single session is stored which means it is more efficient and less resource intensive for the board.

It enables board owners to see how many members signed up as a result of our traffic since all traffic we send uses the vbulletin referral system.

It allows board owners to control exactly what forums we have access to since the user account is controlled by the boards built in permissions system.

[BoardTracker]

You are a serach index, that's all you are. Until you have a crawler that can work on it's own, that's all you will be.

We do have a crawler as I already said, we are also robots.txt compliant. How else do you think we get data to index? You can read all about it on our spider info page..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/



You are also a niche search index in as much as you only want bulletin boards in the index.

Of course we are a niche search engine, thats kind of the point. Thats what makes it good. Its the same for technorati and shopping.com and google blogsearch etc etc. Horses for courses.. don't you understand that?


Those two things seperate you very far from the engines you claim you are exactly like.

Not at all. A search engine is for searching data of some kind.. what data it searches is not the point, it is still a search engine.



TAZ? I knew the club mentality was there and that proves it.

I really have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Care to explain?


I'm sorry you are getting annoyed that I will take your assertions and show the lack of truth in them.

Lack of truth? Everyone can see clearly and easily that we speak the truth, it is all verifiable by all board admins.. your claims are simply wrong and you dont even take the time to actually try it for yourself to see that you are wrong.


Repeating yourself over and over will not make those statements true either.

My statements are already true. Try it for yourself and you will see..

[Noppid]

We do have a crawler as I already said, we are also robots.txt compliant. How else do you think we get data to index? You can read all about it on our spider info page..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/




Of course we are a niche search engine, thats kind of the point. Thats what makes it good. Its the same for technorati and shopping.com and google blogsearch etc etc. Horses for courses.. don't you understand that?



Not at all. A search engine is for searching data of some kind.. what data it searches is not the point, it is still a search engine.




I really have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Care to explain?



Lack of truth? Everyone can see clearly and easily that we speak the truth, it is all verifiable by all board admins.. your claims are simply wrong and you dont even take the time to actually try it for yourself to see that you are wrong.



My statements are already true. Try it for yourself and you will see..

I'm actually compelled to try it believe it or not. But I still disagree on a few of your points. But since I can't scare you off, I have a feeling you have good intentions. Most go away when challenged. Thanks for taking the time to debate this. There are some very valid point counter points that others can use as they wish for gathering information to make a decision.

In the end, building content is good. So I'm compelled to keep arguing with you just to keep building this thread. But we'd just be going in circles at this point.

I have two forums. I think I'll get over there and try it. As you said, it can't hurt. Hell, I'll even list ya on my links page if this turns out as you say it can or even close to that.

Thanks for being a sport, I know I can be hard to take at times. :eek:

[BoardTracker]

Thanks for being a sport, I know I can be hard to take at times. :eek:

No problem. ;)

[Peggy]

Thanks for being a sport, I know I can be hard to take at times. :eek:
naahhh, not you..................................... :p

[RidinHighSpeeds]

I was just accepted by boardtracker and I just finished adding all my forums to the specific categories. Now all I have to wait for is for the bot to visit my site.

I would assume the signup rate would be considerably higher with a referrer from boardtracker.com than lets say google.com

I receive plenty of traffic from Google and Yahoo, but a very small actually converts to members.. I bet it's because the information they are looking for, is not an article from some type of news source...it's just an article from an average joe. So the next thing for them is the back button.

Now on a site like boardtracker, anyone who is looking for something, they are obviously looking for something that was posted by an average joe since they are searching posts among many forums (not news sources such as foxnews, etc.) That is why I think this is going to be a great benefit for my forum.

Catch my drift? Anyone agree??

Thank you so far boardtracker for accepting my forum. I can't wait for the boardtracker bot to visit my site and start scanning. I'm sure with politics, and the differences of opinions many people have these days, boardtracker might help me attract more members.

[Noppid]

I was just accepted by boardtracker and I just finished adding all my forums to the specific categories. Now all I have to wait for is for the bot to visit my site.

I would assume the signup rate would be considerably higher with a referrer from boardtracker.com than lets say google.com

I receive plenty of traffic from Google and Yahoo, but a very small actually converts to members.. I bet it's because the information they are looking for, is not an article from some type of news source...it's just an article from an average joe. So the next thing for them is the back button.

Now on a site like boardtracker, anyone who is looking for something, they are obviously looking for something that was posted by an average joe since they are searching posts among many forums..any not news sources such as foxnews, etc. That is why I think this is going to be a great benefit for my forum.

Catch my drift? Anyone agree??

Thank you so far boardtracker for accepting my forum. I can't wait for the boardtracker bot to visit my site and start scanning. I'm sure with politics, and the differences of opinions many people have these days, boardtracker might help me attract more members.

yes, but getting the joe blows that search in the know about board tracker is the problem or the chicken and the egg senario in this case.

Until the place is known and joe blows actually can get there to search and want to get there and search, it's just us admins looking at each other across the locker room.

Beyond that, I think everything you said makes sense.

[RidinHighSpeeds]

yes, but getting the joe blows that search in the know about board tracker is the problem or the chicken and the egg senario in this case.

Agreed with you 100% But hey, BoardTracker is roughly new isn't it? It's not that easy to make it big. I'd say give them a chance. If BoardTracker becomes a "known" search engine, then us forum owners will be well off, thanking boardtracker.


Until the place is known and joe blows actually can get there to search and want to get there and search, it's just us admins looking at each other across the locker room.

Sure is...but I think boardtracker is going to become a more popular service, and eventually known to many. Once that day comes, it will be good. haha


Beyond that, I think everything you said makes sense.

Thank you. :cool:

[Noppid]

No doubt. After all my banter, I can't come up with a reason not to try it despite all of it.

Like I said, it certainly can't hurt and these folks seem committed.

See ya in the SERPs.

[Hell³]

Looking forward to your feedback noppid. I´m glad this site realizes the value of true debate, as heated as it may be.

[Noppid]

Looking forward to your feedback noppid. I´m glad this site realizes the value of true debate, as heated as it may be.

I actually enjoy playing devils advocate to be honest. Some take it the wrong way, and sometimes I bet I go too far. But moderation was never one of my virtues. :p

I have alot of respect for someone that keeps their cool when I'm pushing buttons and comes back for more after the push.

I have not gotten over there yet, I have too much back logged work, some involving a learning curve, so I can't take the time to read and play today. But I will get myself over there and try out the system soon.


One of my finer points, if I say so myself, is that when I'm wrong, I'll admit it in public and apoligize. I don't know if that applies here really, but I feel like I can debate fairly and change my position when given facts with an open mind. So I'll go into this with just that, an open mind. :)

[Demojames]

I am going to be one of the ones who have been with Board Tracker since May of this year and have had no problems with them.

I have receive 2 members from them, sure that may not seem like much, but I have a very very niche forum, unlike most here.

I have never had to pay, link back, or anything. When I joined Board Tracker, I figured since I had such a niche forum that I need almost anything to get people to my site.

[Noppid]

I am going to be one of the ones who have been with Board Tracker since May of this year and have had no problems with them.

I have receive 2 members from them, sure that may not seem like much, but I have a very very niche forum, unlike most here.

I have never had to pay, link back, or anything. When I joined Board Tracker, I figured since I had such a niche forum that I need almost anything to get people to my site.

That's the train of thought I've come to. I hope for success.

[Peggy]

I joined boardtracker a few weeks ago :p

[Noppid]

I joined boardtracker a few weeks ago :p

Coming out of the closet I see?:rolleyes:

[Peggy]

lol...you'd be surprised what's in my closet.... ;)

[Noppid]

lol...you'd be surprised what's in my closet.... ;)

Closets are for hangers. ;)

[Peggy]

Closets are for hangers. ;)

and hangers-on :p

[Xx_KiNg_AnGeL_xX]

i still dont understand why i would have to sign up. my board is all over google i never signed up with them. No your tracker in no way can compare to google from what i see. yes both are search engines but then how does it help the site to sign up for a search engine that no one knows about. what i want you to see with out being a registered member is all over google one of the most used search engines so i see no point in having to sign up for a engine that ive never seen lol lets be real how good can it be if you are here posting and tring to from what i see sell your free sevice google has a bot on my site at least once a week and i think that gets the word out just fine for my kinda site y waste time with a search engine that is begging people to sign up be real if it was advanced youd have bots on mine and every other site

i didnt send the time to read every post some of this may have been said already but from what i see this whole thing is a waste of time and by signing up i hope that you are checking that your not allowing then to enter your site or haven to add any thing that may leave a back door for hackers

[BoardTracker]

i still dont understand why i would have to sign up.
You don't have to sign up.


how does it help the site to sign up for a search engine that no one knows about.
No one knows BoardTracker? How do you know that? Do you have any idea how much traffic we have? Thousands of board members we referred would disagree with you.


what i want you to see with out being a registered member is all over google one of the most used search engines
So what happens if one day google drops your board from their index? End of your business? Or do you perhaps have your board indexed in Yahoo also? Ever heard of not putting all your eggs in one basket? Diversify your marketing efforts.


so i see no point in having to sign up for a engine that ive never seen lol
So before you saw Google you thought the same? Seems you don't anymore..


lets be real how good can it be if you are here posting and tring to from what i see sell your free sevice
Well it was not us who started this topc, we simply responded to a post made by someone else in another topic which was then split and became this topic. We didn't come here to 'sell' anything, we came here to answer questions about BoardTracker. Do you think its better for a company to ignore people asking about their products or services?


google has a bot on my site at least once a week and i think that gets the word out just fine
So.. you have a hot topic on your board about a current event.. googlebot spiders it a week after the event and it is added to their index and becomes searchable maybe a month or more later if you are lucky.. is that good? BoardTracker indexes in near realtime.. new topics are searchable often within minutes and not only searchable but we also notify all our members by email and IM about any new topics matching their interests. We also provide rss feeds so many people will see new topics of interest through their rss readers or through the various meta search engines which use BoardTracker feeds which accounts for a sizeable percentage of our system usage.


for my kinda site y waste time with a search engine
Indeed, why waste your time promoting your board.. ;)


that is begging people to sign up
Ye we just stand in the street, cap in hand, begging for people.. :rolleyes:


be real if it was advanced youd have bots on mine and every other site
Ye and we could just fill our index with billions of spam pages right now.. any idiot can build such a bot. We prefer to work in a smarter way and our bot is designed specifically to index boards which, as you should know, are NOT the same as other sites. The end result is a higher quality index for our users. If you read our previous posts and read on our site about how our bot works you might find it enlightening.


i didnt send the time to read every post some of this may have been said already but from what i see this whole thing is a waste of time and by signing up i hope that you are checking that your not allowing then to enter your site or haven to add any thing that may leave a back door for hackers

Well maybe you should take the time to read before making such claims.. if it's not too much effort for you, you could start with our FAQ..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/

[Peggy]

Good comebacks ;)

[Xx_KiNg_AnGeL_xX]

Ok i dont have to sign up or do anything? So i dont need to register your bot? i dont have to edit the shit your allowed to take? I could go back a quote you and show that i do. Ive done that by makeing you register so why dont you just crawl onto the site like the other search engines and get what info you can. Being as i have to register your bot inorder for you to come to my site i think ill call that signing up indeed. Personaly i have a site you have to be vouched onto in order to become apart of it so really what you see as unregistered or unvouched is all i want on any search engine so i wouldnt register your or any other bot. This may be a good thing for some forums but i dont see it as helpfull to me as my kinda site is kinda closed and most our traffic comes from site affiliates. So i guess to me this really doesnt help as people coming in from a search engine may get registered but has a very small chance of getting a vouch as they probably wont know anyone.

[Hell³]

Thats not the kind of "sign up" Boardtracker needs. The system is that before crawling your site, as any other spider, they ask for your authorization (If I understand correctly). It's different as the other (perhaps more rude ;)) spiders work?, yes. Is it better?, that's for you to decide. If you feel it doesn't work for you, well, don't accept it (I won't say don't buy it since it's not that kind of "bussiness")

[Xx_KiNg_AnGeL_xX]

so infact i was correct the first time in saying you have to sign up

[Peggy]

which wouldn't do you any good, if most of your site is closed to the public

[BoardTracker]

so infact i was correct the first time in saying you have to sign up

No you dont have to signup. You can submit your board to be spidered or you can wait for us to find your board which we may or may not do. If you are in a hurry its best to submit, if you dont want to be indexed anyway then why worry about it?

The fact is you CAN register on BoardTracker which gives you greater control over how your board is indexed including which forums within your board get crawled, what categories they should go in and also provides some stats and graphs. I dont know of any other search engine that provides the level of control that we give to board owners but if you don't want that anyway then its a moot point and as I said before its optional but it will help get a board indexed sooner.

[Big Dan]

I've registered and Boardtracker signed up on my site the bot is on all the time "reading" stuff. It certainly isn't hurting me so why not?

[Peggy]

I signed up a few days ago, but BT hasn't been to my site yet :(

[b2w]

I have a question for Boardtracker. I went on there to do a search and my profile or site info comes up and it was picked up from TAZ. Do I still need to sign up for the crawlers to come to my site? If info is already in your search why can't the crawlers come anyway? Do you always need permission to crawl sites? I'm only asking because I'm a newbie just learning SEO and all of these neat things. I need genuine help. Thanks!

[BoardTracker]

You should still submit your board. The only info currently in the search is posts on other boards that mention yours.

[Noppid]

After thinking about this and even taking a look, I have come to this conclusion.

1) While you site is searchable, it's mearly a list of content that is owned by other forums yet will be indexed by other search engines pointing to the board tracker site.

2) It is not a search engine per se' because it will be indexed by search engines. I have never seen google, yahoo, ask, or msn just to name a few, list searches from one another.

Therefore I can only conclude that it is nothing more then monetizing other forum owner's content for the sole benefit of board tracker owners. The bone being tossed is, send your members here to search too and they will find your content.

All forums already have built in search. No one knows boardtracker exists. Forums owners are sending folks to board tracker and perhaps losing members to other boards. The niche' is too niche' in that respect.

I'll have more to say soon. But I want to see the spin that comes next.

P.S. If your site is so great, why use adsense? If it's so great, wouldn't you be able to sell niche ads for each category like other real SE's?

I bet I know your next argument. I'll write it down and show you so you know I didn't cheat when I say I knew it!

[Noppid]

Yeah, I just inspected the robots.txt files of the big three/four search engines. They block each other. Imagine that!

You block google, but not the other search engines to one particular redirect. What kind of black hat SEO is going on there as SE bait?

This is looking very bad. When you can block the other search engines, then you can call yourself a search engine.

Board Tracker is a content collection agency and nothing more. Don't ever try to use the google anology with me again.

[Noppid]

Let's talk about RSS. The feeds at your site are post titles and content from your so called member's boards and links back to board tracker.

That is a good one! I wish I had thought of it!

I'm sure I'll be back with more soon.

Folks, if you are a board tracker member, you had better read this and look at it yourself. The ramifications of this and the negative affects on your SEO are huge!

[Noppid]

Here's a biggie folks. This one is addressed in the google webmasters guide as evil when you use a 0 refresh meta tag that breaks the back button of the browser. this is how the redirect of a link in the board tracker rss feed sends people to your site. But first they let the SE see your content on their page. Does that setup them as the owner for dupe content? I don't kwow yet, more research to do however, back to the evil.


<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="n; URL=http://foo.bar/">
This is a so-called "meta refresh", which on certain browsers causes the document mentioned in the URL to be loaded after n seconds. This can be used for slide shows or for often-changing information, but has some drawbacks. In particular, if you use a value of zero seconds, the user can no longer go "Back" with his back button. He will be transferred to the specified URL, and when he presses "back" there, he will go back to the document with the refresh, which immediately redirects him to the document he tried to get away from.


Board tracker uses a 0 refresh before the user gets to your board and is "trapped" there.

Now the take on this.



Do not use <META REFRESH> tags, since they will trap users (by stopping the back button from working) and search engines will ignore them. And don't use Javascript redirects - not all browsers support Javascript and not all users enable it.


Thus, the search engines will follow board tracker RSS feed links only to board tracker where the search engine will see your content on board tracker, not your site. Your content is in the RSS feed and on the redirect page where the SE will stop.

Choose wisely!

[smacklan]

very interesting info noppid...thanks.

[Noppid]

very interesting info noppid...thanks.

A simple internet search and view of the pages in question will back it up. There is nothing subjective here. It's all SEO infomation that is out there already in volumes.

In this case, it's very bad SEO for board tracker members it would seem.

I want to know about about the redirect blocked from google only in their robots.txt. Oh wait, I can check it. I found so much to research I forgot that I can figure that one out on my own with the SEO tools I have.

But it will have to wait, Mrs. noppid needs some attention. ;) Peggy has the night off.:p

[Peggy]

........Mrs. noppid needs some attention. ;) Peggy has the night off.:p

'bout damn time, you wear me out darlin' ;)

[BoardTracker]

noppid, again you come to the wrong conclusions and seem intent only on trying to find feeble excuses to attack boardtracker.. I will again attempt to correct your flawed claims and assumptions..

BoardTracker IS a search engine, it is as plain to see as the nose on your face.. your saying otherwise wont change that fact.

Google/Yahoo and co. do index each other all the time.. try a site search and you will see hundreds of millions of pages in/from each, however what matters is relevance not how many pages they index.

All boards do indeed have built in search but not being real search engines they do not produce very relevant results and the big ones find that the software simply cannot cope - perhaps one day if your own board is ever that successful you will be 'lucky' enough understand that problem too.

Again though it seems you confuse the two - boardtracker as a standalone search engine and boardtracker the search mod for boards. You clearly can't use the built in board search to search other boards you don't yet know about, which is what boardtracker (the standalone search engine) allows you to do.


Forums owners are sending folks to board tracker and perhaps losing members to other boards.
I think I have told you this about 100 times already and still you ignore it - board owners do not need to link to us to be indexed. What part of that do you still fail to comprehend?

Besides which, do you really think board users are incapable of finding other boards using google/yahoo/etc? Your job as a board admin should be making sure your board provides what your users need so they wont want to leave. Trying to 'hide' other boards from them just so they wont maybe leave is a pointless exercise and doomed to failure. You think google users don't know yahoo exists? Or facebook users dont know about myspace?? There will always be competition in every market, you cannot spend your time worrying that your customers will find out about your competitors (because they always will), you should only make sure that you offer something better.

Why do we use adsense?? Why does anyone? What a silly question. We are not an ad agency, that is why we use adsense. You do know that ask.com also uses adsense?? AOL too. Yahoo even bought another ad agency (overture) for a few billion dollars. What about myspace? They just did a deal with google to provide all the ads (and search) - why is that? Perhaps because myspace is also not an ad agency (or a search engine) and google can do the job better since it is what google specializes in.

As for the rss feeds - you realise those are RSS feeds, not web pages. Generally you view rss feeds in an rss reader such as thunderbird or bloglines. You can't 'go back' to the rss reader, they usually just open a new page when you click a link in the feed. Try it for yourself - view any rss feed in bloglines, click on any link within a feed and you will see that there is no active back button once you arrive at the target site. There is no need or reason to go back to boardtracker and there should not be a way to go back in any case.

HOWEVER, when the feed is used by other search engines (such as tagjag.com) then the back button will take the visitor back to the originating search engine which again is as it should be. For example..

http://tagjag.com/discovery/hosting

Look for the boardtracker results there and click any of them (do not choose to open in a new window/tab of course) and you will see that clicking the back button after arriving at the board, brings you straight back to tagjag, as it should be. Nothing is broken, the user is not trapped, everything works the way it was meant to be except perhaps in your fevered imagination.


I bet I know your next argument. I'll write it down and show you so you know I didn't cheat when I say I knew it!
When questions are asked, we answer them. Trying to guess our answers and writing them down so you can compare them with ours later seems a rather childish pastime, but whatever floats your boat.


Don't ever try to use the google anology with me again.
I will use whatever analogy I see fit and I'll thank you not to tell me what I can or cannot say.

:rolleyes:

[Noppid]

I'm done with you. You can repeat your assertions all your want. I have looked under the hood and anyone else that does will find the same things I did.

[BoardTracker]

I'm done with you. You can repeat your assertions all your want. I have looked under the hood and anyone else that does will find the same things I did.

You see what you want to see, anyone else can see all is exactly as I have explained.

There is no mystery, you have from the start just tried to find things to complain about boardtracker and you are clearly grasping at straws now. I have repeatedly pointed out in excruciating detail why you are wrong however it is your choice not to accept that, but ultimately it is also your loss.

I recommend all board admins do their own research and make an educated decision based on their own conclusions.

We always welcome constructive criticism and feedback from board admins and users so we can improve the service and are happy to address any concerns or questions any may have, either posted on forums like this or through the methods listed on our contact page..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/6/

[Noppid]

You see what you want to see, anyone else can see all is exactly as I have explained.

There is no mystery, you have from the start just tried to find things to complain about boardtracker and you are clearly grasping at straws now. I have repeatedly pointed out in excruciating detail why you are wrong however it is your choice not to accept that, but ultimately it is also your loss.

I recommend all board admins do their own research and make an educated decision based on their own conclusions.

We always welcome constructive criticism and feedback from board admins and users so we can improve the service and are happy to address any concerns or questions any may have, either posted on forums like this or through the methods listed on our contact page..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/6/

Grasping at straws? You may think you can just repeat yourself over and over and make your assertion true, but the facts are the facts and I have given soild examples of why boardtracker is not now and never will be a search engine nor is it good for a members SEO.

In Fact, your service is counter productive to the SEO of your members.

Instead of repeating yourself over and over as to how great you are, how about addressing the seemingly black hat redirect that is blocked from google? Explain you robots.txt in comparision to the big 4 SE robots.txt files.

How about explaining why your member's content is on so many pages at your site before the garbage meta refresh to their site and links to your site, not the members site, so many times?

How about explaining why the RSS feeds list your members content as your content? You think your little copyright disclaimer is doing your members a service?

You are not a search engine and never will be. You are a content collector and have found a clever way to get permission to do so as well.

I looked under the hood and what is under there is no service what so ever to your members, it's counter productive in fact.

[BoardTracker]

I thought you said you were done? lol

The only 'solid examples' you have given denote a lack of understanding of how search engines and particularly boardtracker, works. What you say IS opinion, your opinion, your perception. It is not fact just because you say it and attacking us or other board admins who may disagree with you (such as shelley, whose posts in this thread you just deleted along with one of mine) does nothing to support your opinion.

You also have no idea what the 'fundamental under the hood programming' that powers boardtracker actually is, unless you are secretly one of our developers or are some kind of 'blackhat' search engine hacker.. ;)

Regarding our rss feeds (wooo very blackhat! lol) we chose to block those from google since they would otherwise index them (they did so in the past) which is not a good thing to do with rss feeds unless they are parsed, which google does not do except in their blogsearch.

Otherwise when a google user clicks an rss result they will end up at a plain rss page which is not designed to be viewed in a browser (hence the name rss rather than html) and is of no use at all, nothing will work, no links are clickable, its basically plain text. For example..
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:boardtracker.com/rss

Our system is not in any way counter productive to anyones SEO - we link TO boards and send traffic TO boards.. thats all there is to it.

The only 'content' on boardtracker is snippets which is the exact same thing that will appear on every search engine - we don't even show a cache of any threads, most other search engines (including google and yahoo) show entire cached pages of sites.

Our rss feeds are simply the same search results presented in rss format - thats all they are, no mystery there, just simple rss format search results.

Why do we have to compare our robots.txt file to 'the big 4'? Which big 4 are you on about anyway? Ask.com doesn't even have any robots.txt, yahoo has only partial robots exclusions, msn also partial.. they are all different (if existing at all) and there is absolutely no need or requirement for them to be the same or to exist.

Robots.txt exclusions are for site owners to control access to their own sites and they can use or not use them in any way they choose, just as we can and just as you can and do on your own site.

BoardTracker IS a search engine despite your repeated claims to the contrary. It crawls and indexes data and users can then search it.. that is a search engine, that is what all search engines do, that is what BoardTracker does.

[Noppid]

I thought you said you were done? lol

The only 'solid examples' you have given denote a lack of understanding of how search engines and particularly boardtracker, works. What you say IS opinion, your opinion, your perception. It is not fact just because you say it and attacking us or other board admins who may disagree with you does nothing to support your opinion.

You also have no idea what the 'fundamental under the hood programming' that powers boardtracker actually is, unless you are secretly one of our developers or are some kind of 'blackhat' search engine hacker.. ;)

Regarding our rss feeds (wooo very blackhat! lol) we chose to block those from google since they would otherwise index them (they did so in the past) which is not a good thing to do with rss feeds unless they are parsed, which google does not do except in their blogsearch.

Otherwise when a google user clicks an rss result they will end up at a plain rss page which is not designed to be viewed in a browser (hence the name rss rather than html) and is of no use at all, nothing will work, no links are clickable, its basically plain text. For example..
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:boardtracker.com/rss

Our system is not in any way counter productive to anyones SEO - we link TO boards and send traffic TO boards.. thats all there is to it.

The only 'content' on boardtracker is snippets which is the exact same thing that will appear on every search engine - we don't even show a cache of any threads, most other search engines (including google and yahoo) show entire cached pages of sites.

Our rss feeds are simply the same search results presented in rss format - thats all they are, no mystery there, just simple rss format search results.

Why do we have to compare our robots.txt file to 'the big 4'? Which big 4 are you on about anyway? Ask.com doesn't even have any robots.txt, yahoo has only partial robots exclusions, msn also partial.. they are all different (if existing at all) and there is absolutely no need or requirement for them to be the same or to exist.

Robots.txt exclusions are for site owners to control access to their own sites and they can use or not use them in any way they choose, just as we can and just as you can and do on your own site.

BoardTracker IS a search engine despite your repeated claims to the contrary. It crawls and indexes data and users can then search it.. that is a search engine, that is what all search engines do, that is what BoardTracker does.

More rhetoric and no facts, again. Good luck.

[Xx_KiNg_AnGeL_xX]

blah blah blah i cannt believe this post is still active lol ive never seen a SE come to a site and basicly beg people to join lol

[BoardTracker]

blah blah blah i cannt believe this post is still active lol ive never seen a SE come to a site and basicly beg people to join lol

Again with this nonsense? Did you actually read anything we posted or you just like to make things up? Nobody is begging anyone, we didn't start this thread, we are posting answers to questions.. probably you never noticed 'GoogleGuy (http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/)' on the boards who answers questions about Google (obviously), not sure if there is a 'YahooGuy' as such but amazingly its common practice for all sorts of companies to answer questions posted.. are you perhaps noppid posting under another (brand new) account?? ;)

[Noppid]

Again with this nonsense? Did you actually read anything we posted or you just like to make things up? Nobody is begging anyone, we didn't start this thread, we are posting answers to questions.. probably you never noticed 'GoogleGuy (http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/)' on the boards who answers questions about Google (obviously), not sure if there is a 'YahooGuy' as such but amazingly its common practice for all sorts of companies to answer questions posted.. are you perhaps noppid posting under another (brand new) account?? ;)

Now that's more rhetoric. I aint hiding behind another name either.

Once again, nothing of use here.

[RC Attacker]

Well BoardTracker, I submitted, it would be sweet if you could add me.

[Big Dan]

I've IP banned the board tracker bot from my forum, it seems as if he's still trying to crawl. LOL

Why isn't there an easy to remove my board from the BT listings?

[BoardTracker]

I've IP banned the board tracker bot from my forum, it seems as if he's still trying to crawl. LOL

LOL indeed, we're mind readers and clearly should have known you wanted your board removed before you said anything to us. :confused:


Why isn't there an easy to remove my board from the BT listings?

There IS an easy way to remove it, just take a minute to read our faq (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/) or the spider info (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/) page where it clearly explains how to use robots.txt (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/#robots) to remove your board (or even specific forums within a board) and block the spider.

Not only does it say it on our site but we even said exactly where to find such info, in the email we sent you after you submitted your board..

"Alternatively, to learn more about the BoardTracker spider and how
to disable specific forums listed in the above list, or even the
entire listing, please notify us or modify your robots.txt file as
described here: http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/"


Failing that you could contact us directly to request removal - contact details are clearly displayed on our site which you managed to find in order to tell us (apparently after posting here) that we were 'wasting your bandwidth'.

Our faq also explains how our spider works far more efficiently (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/#TECH_2) than any normal spider and does not waste bandwidth.. once threads are indexed our spider only checks for *new* threads.. you can also see on the graph we provide you in the control panel exactly how often our spider checked your board for new threads and exactly how many it found.

Your board has been removed from boardtracker.

[BoardTracker]

Well BoardTracker, I submitted, it would be sweet if you could add me.

Seems many of your forums (at least those with posts) are currently flagged as 'private' so you will have to let us know what you want to do with those.

[Big Dan]

LOL indeed, we're mind readers and clearly should have known youwanted your board removed before you said anything to us. :confused: -snip-

Thanks for removing me. I should not have to modify my robots.txt file. I should of been able to remove my board just as easily as I added it. I can choose to have my site included but cannot choose not to just as easily?

Maybe your bot should be "smart" enough to know when it's viewing a permission error.. no? After I changed the password on the BoardTracker's account it still tried to crawl as a guest.

You are correct though, I should've emailed you first before posting here. My point is by viewing the no permission error over and over again you are in fact wasting my bandwidth.

[Peggy]

LOL indeed, we're mind readers and clearly should have known you wanted your board removed before you said anything to us. :confused:



There IS an easy way to remove it, just take a minute to read our faq (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/) or the spider info (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/) page where it clearly explains how to use robots.txt (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/#robots) to remove your board (or even specific forums within a board) and block the spider.

Not only does it say it on our site but we even said exactly where to find such info, in the email we sent you after you submitted your board..

"Alternatively, to learn more about the BoardTracker spider and how
to disable specific forums listed in the above list, or even the
entire listing, please notify us or modify your robots.txt file as
described here: http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/"


Failing that you could contact us directly to request removal - contact details are clearly displayed on our site which you managed to find in order to tell us (apparently after posting here) that we were 'wasting your bandwidth'.

Our faq also explains how our spider works far more efficiently (http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/#TECH_2) than any normal spider and does not waste bandwidth.. once threads are indexed our spider only checks for *new* threads.. you can also see on the graph we provide you in the control panel exactly how often our spider checked your board for new threads and exactly how many it found.

Your board has been removed from boardtracker.


interesting... I never received an email from BT after I submitted my forum, so I wouldn't know how either

[RC Attacker]

Seems many of your forums (at least those with posts) are currently flagged as 'private' so you will have to let us know what you want to do with those.
What do you mean? Should I un-private them? I think I'm going to anyway.

[BoardTracker]

Thanks for removing me.
You are welcome. As you clearly see, we work only with boards who want to br in BoardTracker, right? We do not require or even ask for a link-back like some strange person on this thread claim, do you confirm that? It was easy enough to add yourself and (eventually) easy enough to remove yourself, wasn't it?


I should not have to modify my robots.txt file. I should of been able to remove my board just as easily as I added it. I can choose to have my site included but cannot choose not to just as easily?
When you added your board, didn't you contact us? Did it not come to you that it makes sense to simply contact us to ask for removal? Isn't that is the "just as easily" in this case?


Maybe your bot should be "smart" enough to know when it's viewing a permission error.. no? After I changed the password on the BoardTracker's account it still tried to crawl as a guest.
Maybe the BoardTracker Koalas should be smarter. Maybe. But it doesn't require much knowledge, intelect or work to edit robots.txt, does it. Isn't it one of the first thing that any webmaster newbie learns about search engines? And you certainly know about robots.txt. It is there on your site. You changed the password for the BoardTracker account, preventing it from accessing the account, and you are surprised it fails to access the board as a user but does so rather as a guest? :confused:


You are correct though, I should've emailed you first before posting here. My point is by viewing the no permission error over and over again you are in fact wasting my bandwidth.
Indeed you should have. Again, three very simple ways to remove yourself entirely from BoardTracker. All three take very little time. One of which is totally immediate in effect. You could very easily avoided any very little bandwidth "loss" you might have had.


When you added your board to BoardTracker you received an email telling you of the support email where you can ask any question or send any request. Furthermore you were clearly told about our support forum, were you not? And you chose to post a complaint here and block the account rather than contact us or update the robots.txt?
And EVEN then, when you blocked the account, right there and then, your board was not indexed by BoardTracker anymore. isn't that right? Is that something you can say about all the other bots and crawlers on the net?

"but cannot choose not to just as easily?" Is there ANYTHING easier than emailing us "Hi. Please remove our board. Thanks" or even more simply so, add a simply line or two to robots.txt? Is emailing us or posting in our support forum or simply taking 10 seconds to edit robots.txt so hard?


Eventually, and not long after you wanted that to happen, all your threads have(/will) disappeared from BoardTracker. Is that right?

Should we say "Congratulations"? Now your site can not be found by people who search forums. Now your site is a little less accessible, little less known, little less out there. Now you will not be able to use BoardTracker's search mod when your site gets big and the internal search doesn't work properly any more. Now you will not be able to add BoardTracker tagging and tag clouds.
I wonder what you figured you gained though.
While true for even big boards, but especially for small boards, one needs MORE exposure and MORE visitors to a site. Not less. I think you should find better people as "advisors" than Mr. Noppid. People who know enough about web, Internet and web site development. I doubt they will advise you you made the right call...

But, regardless, we are happy to fullfil your wishes regarding to your board's inclusion in BoardTracker :)
Best regards, best wishes and best of luck.

[RC Attacker]

What do you mean? Should I un-private them? I think I'm going to anyway.
Actually, I don't even remember where to un-private them. You know?

[BoardTracker]

interesting... I never received an email from BT after I submitted my forum, so I wouldn't know how either
Was it your email address that was associated with the board submission? If so, you should have an email in your inbox (or caught by a mail/spam filter?)

Alternatively, in case you do not receve email and if you choose not to contact us for inquiries via Email or via our support forum, all you need to know about board inclusion, exclusion and administration is...
here: Board owner's portal in general - http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/
here: Board owner's FAQ: http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/1/
here: Board owner's claim procedure and admin panel: http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/2/
and here: explanation about the Koalas and about robots.txt http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/

:)

[Noppid]

What about the boards that have been spidered by boardtracker because of links in posts?

Should they have been "mind readers" and knew board tracker existed and edited their robots.txt based on clairvoyance?

You're starting to sound condecending now that your game has been exposed and people are seeing you data collection for what it is.

But carry on. It's very telling conversation.

[b2w]

But it doesn't require much knowledge, intelect or work to edit robots.txt, does it. Isn't it one of the first thing that any webmaster newbie learns about search engines?

You shouldn't assume that. This Board Tracker thing seems more complicated to me than the regular SEO avenues that I have taken. I don't know anything about robot.txt. Does your website teach this? If so, I'll go take a look see.

[BoardTracker]

Actually, I don't even remember where to un-private them. You know?
:)
You don't have to un-private them, but in order for BoardTracker to knowingly index private forums, we require a specific request for that from the board owner/admin. So you can simply tell us that you want us to index them anyway.

As for how to do un-private the forums, you will need to do so in the admin CP. Check the forum settings or the user-groups allowed to access the forums. If not in there, add the unregistered group as one that is allowed to view the forums.

[BoardTracker]

You shouldn't assume that. This Board Tracker thing seems more complicated to me than the regular SEO avenues that I have taken. I don't know anything about robot.txt. Does your website teach this? If so, I'll go take a look see.

Yes. As we said - http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/
And again, very easy to simply contact us via email or via our support forum.

[b2w]

Yes. As we said - http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/
And again, very easy to simply contact us via email or via our support forum.

You seem to be here all the time so I can ask my questions here, right? This will save me time from signing up with a new message board (I belong to too many as is).

[RC Attacker]

:)
You don't have to un-private them, but in order for BoardTracker to knowingly index private forums, we require a specific request for that from the board owner/admin. So you can simply tell us that you want us to index them anyway.

As for how to do un-private the forums, you will need to do so in the admin CP. Check the forum settings or the user-groups allowed to access the forums. If not in there, add the unregistered group as one that is allowed to view the forums.
Thanks it's un-privated anyway. Where should I tell you?

[Noppid]

Thanks it's un-privated anyway. Where should I tell you?

I'm thinking of starting an R/C board, can I copy your content too?


I'm just kidding, but there is a point there. ;)

[Big Dan]

I've wasted enough time with boardtracker. I'm very happy with Noppid's "advising" as you put it. He's never pointed me in the wrong direction.

Have a nice day :)

-Dan

[RC Attacker]

I'm thinking of starting an R/C board, can I copy your content too?


I'm just kidding, but there is a point there. ;)
LOL! Well are you really thinking about it? 'Cause I would love to work with you. Or even just let you admin mine...:)

[Noppid]

LOL! Well are you really thinking about it? 'Cause I would love to work with you. Or even just let you admin mine...:)

No, I'm not gonna do that. As for my help, you can have it anytime you need it.

There was a point to my sarcasim though. I'm not going to tell you point blank what to do and what not to do however.

[BoardTracker]

What about the boards that have been spidered by boardtracker because of links in posts?
Boards are not indexed by BoardTracker simply because it happened to find a link to another board on some website. Boards are not added to BoardTracker that way. It is a supervised and controlled process that mostly starts with a clear addition request of the board owner and one that involves manual verification of the board.
I thought you were some "expert" who checked things under the hood. no? :rolleyes:


Should they have been "mind readers" and knew board tracker existed and edited their robots.txt based on clairvoyance?
The great majority of boards in BoardTracker are ones who's admin/owner asked to be added.
As for clairvoyance, I think your ability to claim you know things without even checking or without them even being real shows that at least one person here is. :rolleyes:


You're starting to sound condecending now that your game has been exposed and people are seeing you data collection for what it is.

But carry on. It's very telling conversation.
Yes. I do think posts here are very telling. Especially given the fact that you (and your other account here, who's posts are all but one, in the BoardTracker threads) are very telling. Your "expert" opinion, and your manner.
You are falsely accusing BoardTracker, use name calling and defamation.. and still we post explanations, clarifications, exposing the falsity of your claims and post the true nature of things. We do it respectfully, even when your manner doesn't call for it.
And you think that it is BoardTracker who is presented here in bad light?

If I may be even more telling, I think the fact that you are a moderator on this board is a shameful thing and so is the manner in which you moderate this board. I think that your deletion of posts you don't like, of people who don't agree with you (as you deleted Shelley's posts and one of our posts), or of your own posts showing how rude you are to those people... deleting posts to try to paint oneself in a little better light, is as low as a moderator can go.

[Noppid]

Keep going, I'm enjoying your false accusations and your none answers and your speculation and your spin. There is nothing in the above post even close to true.

You are good at inflamatory 2000 word posts that distract from the facts. But I have said enough and those that know what to look for have seen it.

Thanks for your reply. I think. :rolleyes:

[BoardTracker]

Keep going, I'm enjoying your false accusations and your none answers and your speculation and your spin. There is nothing in the above post even close to true.

You are good at inflamatory 2000 word posts that distract from the facts. But I have said enough and those that know what to look for have seen it.

Thanks for your reply. I think. :rolleyes:

Apparently a moderator can go even lower, by denying what he/she did..
Lucky for you we documented it, in case you happened to forget (since it happened yesterday)..

http://www.boardtracker.com/images/fun/delmsg1.gif

http://www.boardtracker.com/images/fun/delmsg2.gif

http://www.boardtracker.com/images/fun/delmsg3.gif

http://www.boardtracker.com/images/fun/delmsg4.gif

http://www.boardtracker.com/images/fun/delmsg5.gif

http://www.boardtracker.com/images/fun/delmsg6.gif

http://www.boardtracker.com/images/fun/delmsg7.gif

[Noppid]

More content theft. Nice!

However, I stand by everything I said. I have no regrets.

Nice try. ;)

For the record, neither you nor her proved me wrong, so since it's on the table again, prove me wrong. :rolleyes:

[Peggy]

can we all quit the mud-slinging now? Please? I'd like to actually LEARN something

[Noppid]

can we all quit the mud-slinging now? Please? I'd like to actually LEARN something

Apparently by the mass exodus from board tracker by people who realize that it is a content collection agency and bad SEO, many have learned something. ;)

Don't sell yourself short dear.

[Peggy]

but... I am short... :p

[BoardTracker]

mass exodus from board tracker

Keep deluding yourself noppid. Since your baseless anti-boardtracker tirade, two boards were removed and 25 others have submitted their boards for inclusion where they will join the many other extremely successful boards who benefit from our services.

This board moderator's behavior is a disgrace to the board and its members. Anyone with a question concerning BoardTracker can contact us at our support email or support forum, or even any other webmasters message board where mods do not delete and alter posts to present themselves in a better light.

This will be our last post on the matter, although I expect a certain opinionated person will again try to have the last word.

[Joeychgo]

If I may be even more telling, I think the fact that you are a moderator on this board is a shameful thing and so is the manner in which you moderate this board. I think that your deletion of posts you don't like, of people who don't agree with you (as you deleted Shelley's posts and one of our posts), or of your own posts showing how rude you are to those people... deleting posts to try to paint oneself in a little better light, is as low as a moderator can go.



Ok, wait just one minute. I've let the debate go on because I think its important. But I think you need to step back. Directly insulting our staff isnt going to help Boardtracker whatsoever. Your suppose to be a professional so I am sure you see where comments like this do not reflect well on you or your system. It makes me question your integrity and business sense to read posts like this. You have become increasingly condecending in some of your posts, so I suggest you step back, take a deep breath, and realize Noppid looks for the good and the bad in things. Thats his Job here. Noppid is the VBFAQ pit bull. He askes tough questions and looks deeply at things. He complimented you a number of times earlier in the thread, so what changed his mind? Sure wasnt me.

That said, I have just a quick comment on one point. Im sure I will have more...



Thanks for removing me. I should not have to modify my robots.txt file. I should of been able to remove my board just as easily as I added it. I can choose to have my site included but cannot choose not to just as easily?

If you want to remove yourself from Google, you have to either change your robots text, or contact them directly. SO this isnt that big of a deal as I see it... I wouldnt expect more from boardtracker then Google. If Boardtracker respects the robots.txt, then I am satisfied.


FYI - For those who might be wondering why I havent been terribly active, I bought a hosue and am moving on Friday. So I have been busy packing, painting, etc.

[Noppid]

Keep deluding yourself noppid. Since your baseless anti-boardtracker tirade, two boards were removed and 25 others have submitted their boards for inclusion where they will join the many other extremely successful boards who benefit from our services.

This board moderator's behavior is a disgrace to the board and its members. Anyone with a question concerning BoardTracker can contact us at our support email or support forum, or even any other webmasters message board where mods do not delete and alter posts to present themselves in a better light.

This will be our last post on the matter, although I expect a certain opinionated person will again try to have the last word.

You stil have not answered the questions. Are you running away?

Nuff said, content collection, dupe content, meta redirects. Not one addressed. None of which are good for board owners SEO except your's. You can't spin that and you can't explain it apparently so you run. Nice.

Bye

[Xx_KiNg_AnGeL_xX]

this is getting stupid lol back n forth blah blah blah i think this thread should be trashed lol

[Noppid]

this is getting stupid lol back n forth blah blah blah i think this thread should be trashed lol


It's pretty one sided actually. I point out a flaw and ask him to prove me wrong. He types a 2000 word reply and ignores the point never addressing the issue. The typical none answer situation where he figures if he talks enough, the original point will be lost.

Kinda like a politician. :D

But I won't forget the point. ;)

[Joeychgo]

A popular SEO forum has boardtracker blocked via robots.txt. So, I sent the admin this pm.


We noticed you have the boardtracker robot blocked in your robots.txt.

Can I ask why?


His answer:


If I recall there was a couple problems with the spider... 1. it spiders a LOT without referring many users (waste of resources/bandwidth) and 2. it's spider is ultra aggressive and doesn't seem to throttle itself back automatically as needed.

This is basically my feelings on it as well. I havent looked into how 'harmful' it might be.

[minstrel]

Just ion case anyone is seeing this as some sort of personal vendetta by vBulletin-FAQ against Boardtracker, see also http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13611:


The bot:

Currently able to register on versions of vBulletin in the 3.0.x line (3.5 RC's are safe). This is due to a 'crack' in image verification on registration, in short the bot is smart enough to read the image and input the correct code, see this thread:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=151902

The bot registers under the username 'BoardTracker' and a @boardtracker.com email address, at which point it will respond to the email sent to verify the email address is real.

Once it has done all that it begins crawling all threads on your forum, and the fact that it's registered means the normal restrictions placed on other spiders like googlebot (who are browsing under the guest usergroup permissions and not registered user permissions) and not in effect.

Here is some more information I posted yesterday at vBulletin.com, it includes a way to block it via the vB admin cp:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showp...90&postcount=5

Again versions in the 3.5 line aren't effected.

You can read Boardtracker's response and other comments in that thread as well.

One of the bothersome thing about this is that many forums create private "members only" threads for posts that members do NOT want spidered. The way Boardtracker does things means you don't have that protection and once Boardtracker gets it Google and everyone else can also get it.

[Noppid]

One of the bothersome thing about this is that many forums create private "members only" threads for posts that members do NOT want spidered. The way Boardtracker does things means you don't have that protection and once Boardtracker gets it Google and everyone else can also get it.

And as I have shown in previous posts, they way their board at tracker or data collection database is configured to show content, the spiders will see your content as their's. There is a meta refresh that a real search engine spider won't follow to your site thus seeing your content as boardtracker's content as well as the duplicate content issue. Just two problems reiterated for starters.

This is not a real search engine, real search engines don't register on your forum and spider private content to then show in public.

I have posted my findings in previous posts. Please scroll back and read. I have provided enough information, combined with new information coming in everyday, that shows this service is conunter productive to your SEO.

Don't give your content away!

To stop boardtrack from spidering your forum, assuming they don't stop obeying the robots.txt, you add these two lines to your robots.txt. robots.txt is a file you can make in any "text" editor and upload to your website root folder.



User-agent: BoardTracker
Disallow: /



EDIT:
The bot appears to ignore robots.txt