Banned From Digital Point

Jun 012009
 

Banned from Digital Point? Nearly every active member on DP has surely received an infraction or two. I’m not banned yet, but I know it’s simply a matter of time. So my thinking of late is, why be a member of DP if you are just going to get banned?

Why Am I Getting Infractions?

So you may be wondering what I have been doing to get infractions, or maybe why I think I am going to get banned? First may I say I have always been courteous on DP, and always try to follow their rules. That said, my first infraction was a real infraction if looked at today. Unfortunately, it was based on a rule that was put into action AFTER I had made the post. The moderator actually looked back and started giving infractions to members based on stuff already done prior. That is not even remotely fair. Continue reading »

Meta Power Test

Apr 042009
 

Testing the power of Meta. Today I decided to do a little test, and as time goes on I will share the results. I’m sure many of you have heard of the forum, Digital Point. It has an Alexa rank of 240, so you can be certain millions of people have heard of it. Anyhow, a post I wrote a while back about the forum being down, ranked 10th or better for the keyword “Digital Point Forum” on Google. You could imagine I get a ton a traffic from that. Well, I don’t.

Ranking Well Doesn’t Do All the Work

Just because the post is ranking well, currently 6th, it doesn’t mean I’m going to get clicks. The title of the post is the first turn off. “Digital Point Forum Down”, I don’t think many will be clicking on that when looking for their forum. The meta description, this is what this post is about, was simply the first sentence of the post. When I made the post, I was not thinking keyword value or anything. It was simply a notice to my visitors, and I put little effort into optimizing it. The end result, poor title and description generating poor click thrus. Want to know how poor? In all of March Google analytics reported just 1 visitor to the post from the search keyword “Digital Point Forum”, even though it was a fairly popular post to my regular readers.

Getting More Clicks

So knowing I only got one click for all of March from Google for that search term is a little disappointing, but it can now make a great example. Here is how a  great description described in your meta tag can change these horrible numbers. Instead of using the first boring sentence from the post like I was, I have changed the description to say this, “Before you join the Digital Point Forum, read this”. I have turned the description into an ad. Think it will beet last months report of just one click?

Another thing to consider here is if I didn’t change that meta, and continued to not get clicks, think Google will keep ranking that post well? I think not. The race is on for me to take the opportunity, and start getting those visitors to click the free ad, I mean meta description. I’ll make a post next week on how it’s going. First I need the page to get cached again. Look for Putting Your Meta to Work Part II.

Digital Point Forum Down

Feb 102009
 

The Digital Point Webmaster Forum, one the the most popular webmasters forums there is, has been down for over twelve hours now. It crashed a little after 6:30 pm, Pacific Time. I have seen this happen a few times before at DP, and I have found they usually have it up in running by the morning, my time. I am guessing the typical condition is, server crashes while the boss man is enjoys the evening away from the internet, goes to bed, and then wakes up to nightmare. Couple of hours of scrambling, and tada, the site is back up. Let’s just hope this is the case.

Digital Point is a great forum for webmasters new and old. You may have read, I have at least a thousand times anyhow, that DP sucks and so do their members. Well, I can only guess these comments are made by people who have been banned, or people who got burned doing transactions with other members. I’ve been building sites for over twelve years now, and have been a member of DP for three. I think it’s a great forum. Though I have been burned once, I have 100+ other transactions that went great. DP has a great marketplace, a great place to learn about building websites, and a great place to get quick help. Members very in experience from: shouldn’t be building websites to hardcore vetrans making six figures from their sites.

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