Dhammawheel is not growing - because it has zero SEO

[ieee23]

It's also a matter of having the right keywords,

Most people are not going to try out multiple search strings.

[ieee23]

That's why I switched to DuckDuckGo - https://duckduckgo.tumblr.com or https://duckduckgo.com

Most people are going to switch to DuckDuckGo. In the meantime people who Google on "buddhist forum" aren't going to find dhammawheel.com

[ieee23]

I tried these search strings on Google

"buddhist forum"

"buddhist web board"

"buddhist webboard"

dhammawheel.com did not come up on the first page for any of them.

SEO doesn't have to cost money.

I found this from Google for things a person can do their web site to improve visibility

https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... 1184?hl=en

[SarathW]

I found this from Google for things a person can do their web site to improve visibility

What if everybody does the same?

[ieee23]

Not everybody will.

[Circle5]

I found the problem. DhammaWheel does not have a proper redirect set up to redirect from the www version to the non-www version. Also no proper redirect for the trailing slash at the end (sometimes it's dhammawheel.com/, other times it's without a trailing slash).

This means that for google, there are 2 or even 4 websites with identical content so not only having SEO power broken to pieces but also heavily penalized for identical, unoriginal content.

Other than this, there is very little one can do to improve the SEO because it's a forum, there isn't much to be done. I've sent PM to DNS about the other little things, but those will only matter after fixing this huge problem with not having redirects. It should pretty much rank by itself to nr 1 since it's the biggest and oldest buddhist forum.

Being a forum, there almost nothing one can do to it in terms of SEO except break it with that redirect problem. This problem exists ever since that changing of hosting and https version.

[No_Mind]

Nothing very mysterious.

Both sites have same SEO score of 61 from seositecheckup.com

But look at keyword cloud/density --> Dhammawheel has very few Buddhism related words while Dharmawheel has so many vajrayana, mahayana etc

Buddhist is small and buddhism is tiny in Dhammawheel but they are huge in Dharmawheel

Google thinks Dharmawheel is more related to Buddhism than Dhammawheel. The word Dharma is very small in Dhammawheel cloud (but Dhamma is large.)

Either many people do not know or search for the word Dhamma or Google AI does not know Dharma = Dhamma

Strangely search for "Dhamma Forum" brings up Dhammawheel as #1 on page 1

Summary - keywords that Google AI thinks is related to Buddhism (Google AI's idea of Buddhism) such as mahayana, vajrayana, tibetan, rinzai, shrine is missing (not to mention nagarjuna, madhyamaka and so on) from Dhammawheel so it is # 6 on page 2

Otherwise, how can a forum on Buddhism that has died two years ago score higher than Dhammawheel in Google page rank (that one did have the words I mentioned)

In other words Dhammawheel is a niche forum. And well Theravada is a niche religion. At least 1 out of 100 college graduates would recognise the word Mahayana but not even 1 out of 10,000 would know the word Theravada.

[No_Mind]

Dharmawheel keyword cloud

DW_1.png (50.58 KiB) Viewed 4841 times

[No_Mind]

Dhammawheel keyword cloud

DW_3.png (48.61 KiB) Viewed 4840 times

[No_Mind]

Some stats on Feb 24, 2018 and June 2, 2018 for both

Dharmawheel

24 Feb Total posts 416790 • Total topics 24103 • Total members 9063 • Our newest member Aurelius

2 June Total posts 427512 • Total topics 24567 • Total members 9240 • Our newest member adamthiel

increase - posts 10722 (+2.57%) topics 464 (+1.92%) members 177 (+1.95%)

Dhammawheel

24 Feb Total posts 446241 • Total topics 26697 • Total members 12613 • Our newest member Cavinho92

2 June Total posts 460524 • Total topics 27306 • Total members 12800 • Our newest member davisdM7m

increase - posts 14283 (+3.2%) topics 609 (+2.28%) members 187 (+1.48%)

[DNS]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll have our webmaster look into this in a few days as he's busy at the moment.

As Kim noted, it also has a lot to do with which sites you've been visiting as a lot of times as it gets cached. Also another big factor is traffic as sites with higher traffic generally get placed near the top (assuming all other SEO stuff is the same).

Some interesting stats:

DW (Theravada):
Alexa traffic rank: 311,423 (meaning only 311,422 sites are ranked higher, pretty good considering there are over 300 million websites)
133.8 average posts per day

DW (Mahayana):
Alexa traffic rank: 408,390
127.8 average posts per day

Compare to one of the less active Buddhist forums:
FreeSangha forum:
Alexa traffic rank: 1,639,156

DhammaWiki.com
Alexa traffic rank: 719,849

[No_Mind]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll have our webmaster look into this in a few days as he's busy at the moment.

As Kim noted, it also has a lot to do with which sites you've been visiting as a lot of times as it gets cached. Also another big factor is traffic as sites with higher traffic generally get placed near the top (assuming all other SEO stuff is the same).

Some interesting stats:

DW (Theravada):
Alexa traffic rank: 311,423 (meaning only 311,422 sites are ranked higher, pretty good considering there are over 300 million websites)
133.8 average posts per day

DW (Mahayana):
Alexa traffic rank: 408,390
127.8 average posts per day

Compare to one of the less active Buddhist forums:
FreeSangha forum:
Alexa traffic rank: 1,639,156

DhammaWiki.com
Alexa traffic rank: 719,849

This is quite a SEO case study!!

Even with more discussions and more members and more visits Dhammawheel is considered less important/relevant since it caters to one branch of Buddhism while Dharmawheel caters to a broader audience.

Google AI is really smart.

[Circle5]

Very good observation No Mind about the keyword buddhism not showing up. But as for buddhism related keywords and google AI being very smart, that's not quite true. It's actually very stupid and picks based on keyword of that particular search. With "buddhist" being so low in DW, it does not get picked. Look how FreeShanga that is nr 1 has a very big density for exact keyword "buddhist forum".

But all this is useless if DW is not viewed by google as a single site but as 2-4 sites with identical, un-original content. Sites with copied content as viewed as spam sites and also the SEO gets power gets split into many parts. So the most important thing to do is adding redirects from www version to non-www version, then the same for the trailing slash problem. All this while still having in place a redirect for https, the only one that DW does have set up properly.

[Nicholas Weeks]

Dropped Google a few years ago & using DuckDuck, Dhammawheel is #5 or 6 when searching for Buddhism Forum or Buddhist Forum.

Using Buddhist Discussion this DW comes in at #22; using Buddhism Discussion, nothing on first page. So that latter phrase needs some help.

[Idappaccayata]

I think every person want to be number one.
The only way to do this is to pay Google!

You cant pay google to be first