Also, here is the document we worked off of last year:
2 Likes
On this note, I was wondering how does discourse work with regard to indexing? If I try to google MEW the only way it shows is if I type the full ‘Most Epic Win’. ‘Gaming News South Africa’, ‘Geek News South Africa’ etc. bring up nothing pages and pages into the results.
Are we maybe just not putting our feelers out there enough for the indexing to catch us? Just an idea for a topic maybe.
1 Like
I specifically avoided using terms like “gaming” in the site’s description to avoid it getting blocked by people’s work firewalls.
We must find out if it’s working, otherwise we should add those keywords to help Google find us more easily.
Keep in mind that we’re a fairly young domain, and on a non-standard TLD. Google always used the age of the domain as a data point to determine how much it should be trusted. Not sure if it still works like that.
2 Likes
First bump for anyone interested in joining the meeting TOMORROW evening. No need for any alarm, just a friendly reminder.
1 Like
There’s something fishy going on. If you literally type the name of any of the articles into google, it finds nothing. ‘From Software currently working on 2 unannounced titles most epic win’ gets no hits at all. Even older ones like ‘CDProjekt RED is not done with Witcher just yet most epic win’ get nothing. I think that’s half our problem.
2 Likes
Hrm… I’ll double-check if there’s something preventing Google from crawling the site. I doubt it, though. With Ghost and WordPress you have to specifically disable those features.
I’ll sign up for a Google Webmaster account and see what’s going on.
2 Likes
Guys, sorry but I won’t be able to join tomorrow night. See, my wife will be away for one night. Now, that never happens. So I have to live like a bachelor and treat myself. Maybe drink beer and play xbox or something like that.
4 Likes
Right, I’ll keep updating the agenda to ensure we know what we have to discuss, and don’t just sit and share funny memes the whole night with each other.
- Writing and review of articles discussion
- Use of Social Media to gain more users
- Getting MEW noticed by Google and in Google searches
- Planned Activities and the organisation thereof
- Podcast discussion and planning
- Overall business discussion
3 Likes
I’ve set up a text and voice channel for the OGM.
Here’s an invite link to the Discord (which is set to expire tomorrow) in case someone needs one — https://discord.gg/XDTEu
3 Likes
nevermind I will try to be there by then!
Site is definitely indexed. I think the domain and the newness of it is preventing it from showing up for specific terms, like articles for instance. The newer the domain, the slower google crawls. Also i assume there are no real links to MEW, google still puts a lot of faith in links.
Also @SIGSTART, have you hooked up analytics? would be interesting to see that as well.
1 Like
We can chat about analytics at the meeting. I have mixed feelings about using Google’s, but I’m happy to roll our own analytics server based on an open source system.
1 Like
Yeah just from an SEO perspective, its a bit weird. Everything is running on sub domains. That also makes it more difficult. Since your base domain is doing nothing. mostepic.win redirects to ink.mostepic.win for instance. Forums in their nature are tricky. also the words most epic win gets used for so much stuff, will be difficult to distinguish yourself from all the fortnite videos that have millions of views and titles like most epic win.
What time is this starting. I’ll be able to join from 21:00 and not 20:00 unfortunately. Do you all think you’ll still be on by then?
These are issues that were raised when we were choosing the name last year, but folks really loved MEW 
.
Offbeatgamer.com is still an option 
.
Seriously, though, I’m pretty sure that if we focus on good content, and if I implement whatever suggestions Google’s Webmaster tools has for me, in time we’ll rank on Google.
I looked into this before we settled on our technology stack, because Discourse and Ghost (at the time) preferred sub-domains.
According to Google, there is no longer any difference between subdomains and subdirectories when it comes to your domain’s ranking.
We’ll probably still be chatting. Is there something you’d specifically like to discuss? We can try to schedule things accordingly.
1 Like
Jip. Time is key.
2 Likes
Indeed. Thanks for weighing in. It’s really helpful having more than one set of technical eyes looking at MEW’s setup to make sure I’m not accidentally hamstringing us.
1 Like
OK folks, we’re going to get started.
2 Likes
I know this is a couple of weeks old, but was wondering if there are any notes from this OGM, like there were for the 2018 one?
Also, @SIGSTART did you ever get a chance to…
I agree with @Entity and @Talentloos that there is something off with the sites’ SEO and Google indexing. The point about “with time we’ll rank better” is 100% valid, but regardless of ranking, the site posts should still be getting indexed by Google a lot quicker. Before a result can rank it needs to be in the index. And that should happen a lot more frequently than it seems to be at the moment.
With the frequency of posts on the main site, I’d expect to see Google crawling the site a lot more regularly and at least indexing posts a lot sooner than it presently is. It also seems to miss a lot of posts. A site:ink.mostepic.win search for the last month shows only 3 indexed posts. No idea why just those 3, or why an “Any Time” search only returns 201 results in total. There should be a heck of a lot more indexed results from the site, even if none of them rank anywhere in general searches. It could be that the reason only some of the post and tag pages are being indexed is because they are the ones with links elsewhere and are being picked up from Google crawling Facebook, Twitter, etc.?
Maybe it’s a case of needing to add the individual sitemap xmls into robots.txt. Or at least add them to the Google Search Console manually, and not just the main one? So not just /sitemap.xml, but also, at least /sitemap-posts.xml.
I also think it may be worth looking at adding a specific *Allow line in the robots.txt for /community.mostepic.win/ and creating a separate sitemap for the forum (there is no https://community.mostepic.win/sitemap.xml) and adding it to the Google Search Console as a separate property. Much link the main site, any all time site search for just community.mostepic.win returns way less results than what there should be.
2 Likes
I have signed up for a webmaster account. There are some warnings for AMP stuff, but nothing else.
Already signed up for separate properties for ink.* and community.*
It says that 271 valid pages have been indexed for ink.mostepic.win, with 581 intentionally excluded. Those intentionally excluded are AMP links (which point back to the canonical URL), and a bunch of tags. Which is weird, because there are tags that come up in a site:mostepic.win search.
There are 6 crawl anomalies which I’ll have to fix. Nothing urgent, though.
Anyway… all of that is secondary. The main issue is that Google last crawled us on 14 January.
Our biggest problem is that we’re on a brand new domain. Our second problem was that content used to be updated irregularly. My understanding is that Google “learns” this and crawls the site less frequently. So we’ll have to “retrain” the crawler to recognise MEW as a frequently updated site. The last crawl I can see was 14 January.
I’ll manually submit the sitemap and see what happens.
I’ve noticed that there is some strangeness to the way Ghost creates the post slugs. It populates the slug based on the title, so if you type half the headline, then click into the body and back again, you get this bad chopped-off link for the article. That’ll be bad for Google too.
Also looked into a sitemap for Discourse. The consensus seems to be it doesn’t really need one, but will speed up indexing. If we fix the indexing regularity of the whole domain, I suspect we’ll fix the whole issue.
3 Likes