Still un-Googlable...

Rubens

I still can't find us when I Google "piano forum"...
Is it just a matter of time?
So far all the members have joined through word of mouth only.

BartK

The Google PageRank algorithm is pretty clever and it's not so simple as just creating a new site to suddently have all searches redirected to your site. If it were so simple it would be exploited by spammers of all sorts.

No one knows exactly how PageRank works but the basic idea is that it follows all links from other pages that link to a site and ranks sites based on the amount of traffic and the number of external links to the site. So if you want to help PianoTell make sure all your friends know about it and put links to it from diverse sources on the internet (PW, reddit, social media, blogs, etc).

hebele

This is unfortunate. Yesterday I tried to search pianotell but failed. Googling "piano tell", "piano tell forum", "piano forum" did not help. I'm here only because I saw a direct link in a Piano World thread.

Some discoverability would help this forum now a days 🙂

Rubens

And just to make it clear, I'm not saying that navindra is not doing everything possible to make the site visible, and I don't think hebele is saying that either.

I was just wondering how we could help make it more visible. I'm already doing what Bart suggested, and I'll keep doing it.

twocats

It can take weeks or months for Google to decide that you're legit. It might be showing up on search but way down after all the sites that have been established for a long time.

All we can do is keep being active, keep linking from other legit sites, and eventually it'll happen.

FrankCox

The owner of the website (navindra) can register with google.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080

Then he can add the website to google through the google webmaster console.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592?hl=en

navindra

FrankCox As always, you're on the ball with this. David-G also did ping me. I've been waiting for the TXT update to go through to satisfy the console requirement.

FrankCox

Been there, done that. Glad you've got it underway.

And here's Syd asking why I would be typing on my computer when I could be paying attention to her instead.

She can definitely be a pest sometimes. But she's a wonderful little pest! 🙂

SouthPark

It will come up eventually. At the moment, when I google pianotell, it gets us to the piano world post about piano tell. So it then becomes a simple process of clicking on the link in that first post to get to piano tell. But after a while, guaranteed that Ptell will come up directly in google.

WieWaldi

Someone told me, Google has a tracking method, how long people stay on a certain site.
If people click on a site and go away too early too often, Google learns this site isn't interesting and ranks it down.

My only question is: how can Google track this?
Maybe Chrome browser sends user data. Or google just reacts, if the same computer hops on another search result from the same/similar search query.

FrankCox

Many websites have a bit of javascript code from Google Analytics that's intended for that prupose.

https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/

You can avoid much of this tracking by using something like noscript.

https://noscript.net/

This sets up a way to control which websites are allowed to run javascript on your web browser.

After all, javascript is a programming language. Is it wise to allow every random website to run a program on your computer?

navindra

Hopefully this will self-resolve now — finally figured this out! Newbie saying 'hi' here. 👋

If you're curious, I first got stuck on registering the TXT entry for forum.pianotell.com because the latter is configured as a CNAME. TXT is not apparently not compatible with CNAME and there was no indication of any problem when I registered the TXT entry. Good number of hours/days wasted supposedly waiting for DNS propagation.

Fortunately, Google provides an alternative where you can register a CNAME for a random domain. So I registered a new CNAME for <randomstring>.pianotell.com. Google was not picking up the update and all the docs say DNS takes 72 hours to propagate, etc.

Turns out that was not the problem. I needed to register a CNAME for <randomstring>.forum.pianotell.com and not <randomstring>.pianotell.com. Grrr.

Obvious once you know it, I guess? So Google and Bing both have the site map now...

Pallas

navindra Gosh I'm just glad you can figure all this stuff out. Half of what you wrote goes right over my head, so I'm very grateful you have done all this work for us. Thank you.