[Alexa]

I posted it in another topic. I apologize for my mistake! Let me post it here now, in the right place:

I'm really sorry to interrupt it, but let me add only 1 more, please:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/somethingawful.com

If you guys achieve something like this (level), I will love you now and forever! It's a beautiful life!!!

[mojo]

Mojo you're talking deep, sweet and it's a pleasure to read and reread your post. The only thing I wish to explain is that it's not exactly true that

I'd like to point to a couple of things that are the drivers behind my statement. There are always exceptions to every rule. Large sites just take longer for it to hit them than smaller sites that don't have the viewership to spare.

The first point I'd like to make is the life cycle, not just of forums but of all on line sites.

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◈ The Early Days: The website provides one service and provides it well.

◈ The Growth Period: People recognize that the website's service is excellent and flock to it.

◈ Maturity: The websites' creators are elated with their new found success and seeking to improve their services, begin to make performance upgrades, updates, design changes, and create new exploratory features.

◈ Bloat: The site is no longer growing at a rate it once was. Creators start to implement predatory features that return greater revenue return per visitor or it morphs into a complicated and burdensome site that offers greater services than just the one they did well. This continues until the last step is reached.

◈ The Autumn Years: People start to notice that the site no longer provides the one service they care about as well as it used to and they start looking for a competitor that will provide that one service and do it well.

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The second point I wish to make, comes from a series of posts by webmasters, dated some 2 years ago, in their experiences with running sites, particularly forums.

https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4641876.htm

Make note that they are not just talking about the present date at the time of the posts but also of a past history going back as much as 10 years.

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This is offset by other nations and countries coming into better economic futures but they aren't as populous on the net as the earlier first world countries as their economies continue to grow and expand. It does provide a cushioning effect where inquiries into growth, look not that bad while continuing to shrink over a greater period of time.

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Lastly I would like to make mention of higher ranking sites that now don't do forums but rather are condensing responses from well planned to such as twitter with it's 140 character limit. A well known and researched topic on this matter is that it seems concentration and attention spans degrades with longer internet usage. This in turn is likely to lead to the masses leaving what was once a well developed way to communicate as well as learn.  The link I provide is but one of many. 

[MSL]

About the 'life cycle' -- it's valid for many of the websites (and even services offline), but I'll point to some facts: some websites exist only a year (or even less), because their owners can't earn even enough to pay the domain and hosting. I know different cases like: "I've got a great idea! I'll be rich!... Oh... it's not working so well. OMG, I didn't earn even these 30 (25, 50, whatever) dollars back!!! Hell, I can't afford to pay it for another year. Who wants, it for free?"... These are many cases, every year. Maybe all of us noticed how many new sites are coming up and then disappearing forever.
 Other exceptions: 'Rigid' websites. They just exist like monuments. The owners are not willing to abandon them and they continue to pay every year domain and hosting. Most of the content is the same, unchangeable. No development, no cycle. I have a perfect example -- a forum ('The First Bulgarian Virtual Pub') I sold out years ago (for USD100): kry4ma.com (Currently the last post is

on: January 08, 2015, 11:34:46 AM

).
 About that webmasters' discussion, I haven't this kind of observation. Forums that ranked well before (I remember them) are ranking still well now. (I checked some of the keywords and the 'long-tails' around an hour ago.)
 An example of a forum that's doing well long time already and having a comparatively small predominant language (Bulgarian) is a forum about parenting, babies, kids, etc. -- bg-mamma.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bg-mamma.com). According to this https://www.similarweb.com/website/bg-mamma.com#overview it gets around 3.8 million visitors monthly.
 By the way, I don't remember if it was mentioned already, so I'll say about it: http://www.thebiggestboards.com/largest.php (a list of very big forums, by post count).
  I'm not an oracle (in fact, I think they do not exist ), so I can't be sure, if Google 'likes' less the forums, but what I can see and feel is that a well-written content (with other SEO support as:
- shared/linked in other sites
- visited by many netizens)
is going to rank high, no matter on what platform it's based (blog, forum, wiki, etc.) But it matters, of course how aged and how trusted is this concrete platform. Guess which is better -- an old website (aged) with good link juice or a new one without any link building?

[SEO]

Glad to read long posts with fresh content here and following this beautiful 'stream' I'll add that I'm pretty satisfied of the rankings of this site (for its age, quality and quantity, social profile, visitors, links, etc. it's ranking well and I can't complain.)

More (some sentences will be related to what you/we spoke here already; some will be just my thoughts):

1. It's easy to stimulate your good visitors with material presents as vinegar, noodles, rice, soy sauce, soaps and so on, and so on, if you're rich or if you have got sponsors. The scheme with the sponsors is very easy and optimal: "Our site provides you some ads and you pay us some money + give some of your products for our best members!" (For example Mojo is producing carrot cakes {I read his recent [urlhttp://www.seo-forum-seo-luntan.com/food/carrot-cake/]carrot cake recipe[/url] and that is why I choose this example.} And he is ordering a week long ad for his carrot cakes. He's paying for this and he also may provide 2 carrot cakes for free, which we can send to some of the best ones around.)

That's why I hope people to understand the differences between some site owners with good ca$h and/or good number of advertisers/sponsors and other website owners, without $$$ and without any sponsors.

2. The development of this forum is a fact, but the speed development is sort of slow. When something changes slow, you can't get the change. It's not the same to see 1, 2, 100, 800, 999... and 0, 1, 1.5, 1.55, 1.57, 1.98.... But, if you take a look back, you'll notice that the situation now is obviously better than the situation in 2011.

3. Maybe for some of you it's disappointing to see such a slow progress and I'm sure that most of the users here doesn't care about it, because they're only readers (lurkers) or SEOers (including spammers and spambots).

If you're one of the first group (the disappointed), you have only two reasonable useful moves: a/ stop your high hopes and expectations. Let it be. Just let it be and hope/expect something else. b/ use the easiest non-SEO way to improve the forum (some call it 'Green hat SEO' or just 'Green SEO'). As I said it's to post more. If we have here 1 000 000 posts and only 1% of them attracts visitors in 24 hours, it equals 10 000 visitors daily and 300 000 or 310 000 monthly (except in February ).

[PTC]

I post, when I need to.

[英语课]

Milk

Because we already speak about it. A picture of my RMB 1000 milk prize (and it's a part only):

Chinese milk

[SEO]

And once again -- we can't afford this here. We have no sponsors, so we can't give presents or pay for participation. But, at least, we don't ask our users to donate money; we're not rich and we're not beggars.