Save Fireflyfans.net
POSTED BY: dreamtrove
UPDATED: Monday, April 13, 2009 09:24
VIEWED: 10647
PAGE 4 of 4
Haken
I wondered if something like this was happening. Google is selectively returning different results based on your ISP, so it has a different pigeon rank for each server. I'm on frontier DSL, so probably I'm the one kicking it back up, me not being here probably causes it to fall, unless other people here are on the same server.
I can see why they would do this. It's the easiest way to get regional alteration of results. Anyone using Vodaphone for internet access is probably not looking for Chinese Language pages as results.
I wonder when they started doing that. It used to be I would get a large number of european language sites, and now, not so much.
Currently, FFF is 17th for me.
Oh, and some people are missing the point here: Whether firefly is trending up or down is not relevent to the present discussion. This is regarding how haken's site compares in ranking to other firefly sites, not to other TV shows which are not returned on a firefly search. Firefly dominates the "firefly" search results, so this is really how FFF stacks up against direct competitors.
The insect is not really a competitor for its own name here. There is a product firefly cellphone for kids, a few others, but really, almost all the top results are other Firefly/Serenity Whedon-based sites.
I suspect that this interests me and Haken more than the rest of y'all from an internet seo angle, but it's worth figuring out.
Here's my current ranking of results on a google search for firefly, which I now know is specific to my DSL:
1. Firefly (TV series) - Wikipedia
2. Firefly Mobile Phone for Kids
3. "Firefly" (2002) TV - IMDb
4. Firefly | SCIFI.COM
5. Firefly Media Server - an internet radio site
6. Firefly Episode Guide - scifispace.com
7. Firefly: Complete Series on Blu-ray - Amazon
8. BrownCoats.com - a fan site
9. Firefly Studios - a UK fantasy game designer
10. Firefly Free Full Episodes - tv.com
11. FireflyWiki.org - a wiki for the 'Verse
12. Firefly Restaurant - San Francisco
13. Firefly Restaurant - DC
14. Firefly Restaurant - Framingham
15. firef.ly - a browser sync site *
16. Firefly filemanager - a firefox plugin
17. FIREFLYFANS.NET
* browser sync was an idea a few years ago that wouldn't it be neat if you could find out who else was browsing the same page as you somewhere on the web. Neat idea, never took off. People dislike anti-privacy measures even if they lead to interesting conversations, etc. I think that facebook is headed for a fall along these lines. This page is full of broken images, so hasn't been updated in a long time.
Now FireflyWiki also I wanted to note has on their homepage "for the show and *upcoming* movie"
7/10 of the first page are Firefly fan sites, so I think the proposed waning of fandom is not an issue. This is relative to firefly. I also think waning fandom is incorrect, but that's not so relevent.
10/10 results on the first page of a search for "buffy" are Buffy fan sites. This is up from 6/10 when the show was actually on the air, years ago. (And then I was including buffy rpg and ccg sites as fan sites, which shared space with Buffy Tyler and the Buffy-Porson)
Some words have much more competition. Still, Angel holds a lot of the tops spots for "angel" (5/10)
Heroes is giving me (8/12, don't ask, I don't know) for "heroes", another competitive word.
Chuck is 5/10 for "chuck"
Twilight is 9/10 for "twilight" with Stephanie Meyer displacing the Campbell story and the Rod Serling anthology show. But unless something like this happens, you can pretty much expect your name to hold the word, unless it's something really common. the other 1/10 result was for the time of day, twilight.
Overall, there's an obvious couple of things going on here. There might be slippage in firefly dominating firefly searches, but it could be on the rise, all these other guys were there when the show was on the air, except maybe the firefox plugin. Actually, there were pages referencing the insect when the show was on the air. The key is FFF is losing to other fans s
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Regarding the rank fluctuation, what I have observed with yahoo search results over the years.
The rank generally stays consisent. At certain intervals, I normally feel it's about every 3-4 months, there is a juggling in the rankings - I will notice that the "new" ranking is actually exactly the same as it was the last time juggling occured. This means that if I've bumped a result up to the top 10, drooping into the teens, and suddenly it's not there, then I know to go to 104th ranked result, because that's where it was the last time juggling happened. I don't know the exact cause, but I figured servers were getting updated, and servers were not synced, and maybe servers which had been off-line for a while were being used while the main servers were having work done (often an older server, with less capacity, or a "known good" database are used when problems occur with the "newest and greatest" equipment). I have noticed during these periods that searching once, and then exiting and searching again can give widely varying results - like I'm getting a different server from one minute to the next. Kinda depends on which one, or how many, are busy at any given moment. I'm always using my work computer, where we have T1 lines.
So this phenomena mentioned for this week or 2 might not be permanent, and I'd be inclined to think it won't be, past the time the work google is doing gets done.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Hmm. Interesting. There may be some internal bias in the servers giving abnormal preference to certain sites, wikipedia, amazon/imdb. I'd guess 114th says that Yahoo! is reloading a lot of old data into its system every time it recalibrates.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Hmm. Interesting. There may be some internal bias in the servers giving abnormal preference to certain sites, wikipedia, amazon/imdb. I'd guess 114th says that Yahoo! is reloading a lot of old data into its system every time it recalibrates.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine during lunch about the ranking. He said that Google wants to tailor the search results to a specific user, but due to privacy concerns, they haven't been able to do that yet.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Dreamtrove, you're making the assuming that all that translates into fans. Are you sure that's a good assumption? Because, I really really don't.
I really think that you're hoping is leading to bias in your interpretation of this, so called, data.
----
I am on The Original List (twice). We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
Dreamtrove, you're making the assuming that all that translates into fans. Are you sure that's a good assumption? Because, I really really don't.
I really think that you're hoping is leading to bias in your interpretation of this, so called, data.
----
I am on The Original List (twice). We are The Forsaken and we aim to burn!
"We don't fear the reaper"
Not sure what point you're trying to make. When I do these things it is to make it easier for others to find the link I want them to find if they enter reasonable serach words or phrases. I don't expect to create fans by luring those who enter "Firefly" away from some bug fascination.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Regarding the rank fluctuation...
Here's something else interesting about the ranking, I've noticed that using 3 different browsers (IE, Firefox, and Safari) to perform a Google search would return 3 different sets of results.
The 3 different results could possibly be due to different cookies for each of the browsers. Regardless, it seems that Google may well indeed be tweaking the results based on a particular user, or in this case, a browser.
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I care, but aside from posting links to the site what else can we do?
Isn't the keyword Firefly based on THIS website and not anything we can do? Unless we say Firefly a lot in the forums maybe? 
Firefly, firefly, firefly, firefly, Serenity, firefly, firefly....
---
http://tinyurl.com/cnwxmx
- Make money online filling out surveys!
http://www.surveysafari.x10hosting.com/ - My website; A guide to filling out surveys with tons of tricks & tips.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Haken,
Interesting point. So their current shortcut is to do it by ISP. They might be doing it by isp server as well. Meaning stny.rr.com and san.rr.com may not return the same ranking.
Simga,
I think you're missing the point. This is a discussion about the search for "firefly" which returns almost entirely Firefly fan sites as results. This isn't about the rise or fall of firefly popularity, but about FFF within firefly fan sites, many of which were listed above. It's not that we're at war with other browncoats, but as web developers are genuinely interested in what effects the rankings, and the sudden plummet of FFF in late march might have had something to do with Haken's working on Shiny Universe, I'm not sure, still trying to unravel it.
Haken,
Interesting that you were able to get SU up to PR4 almost instantly, FFF is only PR5, though it used to be higher, which is probably part of the reason. FFF got a downgrade from PR6 to PR5 which probably made it vulnerable.
I'm curious of what you think of the "preferential treatment" theory, which I concede is not my own, but one I picked up from web forums. The basic idea is that google is either directly or through intentional manipulation of the rules featuring "partner sites" as top results, such as wiki, amz, and imdb. The competing theories are that these sites are just very good at manipulating the system, or that these sites are just much higher in traffic.
At any rate, it's fairly useless to have Amazon: Firefly DVD, buy here, as a search result, and while that doesn't happen for me, similar things happen on a lot of searches (free advertising?) But let's face it, this would make google a useless search engine. If I wanted wiki, amz, or imdb results for an item I would go to those sites. Face it, if you don't know those sites, you're probably part of the user base that doesn't know how to use a search engine. (at the very least the population who has never used || in a search.)
JTF
LOL. Sorry SN, but JFT, that was pretty funny.
Haken,
Different browsers returning different results, that's really interesting. Also, the trend towards user specific results. That's going to make this game harder.
Jaynesmane,
Gosh. I don't know. I thought by searching on firefly and selecting this link we would pigeon peck it up, but Haken's saying that effect would be very localized. I guess at this point we should probably really focus on why it's happening, and what the mechanics of SEO and traffic are, not just to keep FFF alive, but for the sake of our future projects, like Shiny Universe.
The fact is that there is a strong tide towards the MSM getting all of the traffic flow, a tide which has to be stemmed. I mean, I dread the day when all search results and traffic just steer you directly to fox.com/whatever. The solution to that ultimately is to better understand the mechanisms of traffic.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
More info, maybe useful...
I posted a link to a site, both sites are fairly specialized. When yahoo seraching each day I'm online, results for the linked-to site have shown older results, and not the new one I posted up until 9 Apr. Now it has shown up, so that's about 2 weeks for yahoo to find a new post with a linky in it. I think tha's about the noraml time I've seen in the past, but sometimes it takes longer.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME