On a lark, I just Googled "Mac (& intosh) forums," and FTM didn't turn up in the first 120 hits (at which point I quit looking).

That leaves me thinking that we may be losing MANY hits because of our generic name, and that although we're pretty well into the game already it may be worthwhile considering a name-change adjustment/expansion.

Alternatively, more likely preferably, a minimally interfaced re-direct site would, I think, suffice.

FTM is in Google's index, but it doesn't have a very high page rank yet.

I'm not sure that changing the name would help. Rather, the single most important factor to a site's PageRank is the number of sites that link to it. If we can get more sites linking to FTM, our Google search position will go up.

The links that I've found in places like CNet comments don't help, because CNet puts a "nofollow" tag in forums and comments (basically, an instruction for Google not to consider those page links when calculating page rank).

One thing I can do is link to FTM from my own personal Web site, which has very high page rank. If anyone has suggestions for getting the FTM name out there with links from other sites as well, that would be helpful.

How about TechSurvivors?

> I'm not sure that changing the name would help. [....]

OK... But doesn't the fact that the FTM home-page doesn't identify the site as a "help forum" in any way, i.e. doesn't give the spiders something on which to bite, enter into the picture at all?

You don't think that a minimally interfaced re-direct "FTM Forums" (or some-such) site that better quantifies FTM would be helpful?

I think it is a good idea. I am hanging around on the CNET lately and most questions are about troubleshooting, whereas her, most of the activity is in the Lounge. Adding a word "forum(s)" might be good to attract audience. I and others are trying to direct people from CNET to here but they do not allow the competitor links in the posts, so finetunedmac.com gets buried in the text and does not seem to do the job well.

Quoting tacit: "Rather, the single most important factor to a site's PageRank is the number of sites that link to it. If we can get more sites linking to FTM, our Google search position will go up."

I've gotten the impression that you're involved in education, so would it be possible for you (and, of course, all others with similar connections) to get your institution's IT/support website to link to FTM?

It would:

• Relieve your IT/support guys of some pressure (and, perhaps, save them from some embarrassment);

• get our message out to kids, the people most likely to spread the word fastest and farthest;

• mesh nicely with tacit's plan.

I don't know that that would help, but it's an easy enough thing to do that I don't see any reason not to.

Unfortunately, I am in a research institute at a big hospital. Moreover, our IT people are really below par...
I must also admit that the number of posts on CNET forums looks significantly declined compared to old forums. So we should not be discouraged.

> I don't know that that would help, but it's an easy enough thing to do that I don't see any reason not to.

That's reasonable; at the least, we'll learn something.

> Unfortunately, I am in a research institute at a big hospital.

My thought, although presented to you, was addressed to the entire FTM community; surely some of us are in education and can spread the word to students, and IT people...maybe even fellow faculty members?

> Moreover, our IT people are really below par...

That fits into the plan; your sub-pars could pass the buck to us, and we wouldn't mind in the least.

I am thankful I found where everybody went for the most part. The CNET version of MacFixit is a travesty. Fortunately, I was able to google search for "where did MacFixit forum people go" (I know , so astute..) and found this link thru CNET's own forum. Glad to know the community did not completely disappear!

Good detective work! Welcome to FineTuned Mac.

> Glad to know the community did not completely disappear!

Welcome aboard, and if you can help spread the word, please do.

Just checked for "mac troubleshooting forum" today and FTM is number 11 on Google search list!
To clarify: no quotation marks either.

I just Googled the words "mac troubleshoot forum" without the quotes. FTM was on page 10 (ten). MacFixit Forum was first. I wonder if a name change that includes Mac, troubleshooting, and forum and possibly the word help would eventually draw more hits? Those are words people looking the help are likely to use.

Each Google hit shows some remarks that further describe the function of the web site. Often, a word in that first line will show bold type. How do you get that first line into the search? I know nothing about this, but I did notice that some kind of first line seems to attract Google.

> > [i]I just Googled the words "mac troubleshoot forum" without the quotes. FTM was on page 10 (ten).

Yep! We're getting there (wherever that is).

> I wonder if a name change that includes Mac, troubleshooting, and forum and possibly the word help would eventually draw more hits?

Tacit posted some relevant insights towards the top of this thread; have you seen them?

Yes. I read them before I posted, but I couldn't help seeing what actually popped up on my search and still wondered if the name would help somewhat. He obviously knows more than I do about it, but I thought my observation wasn't made irrelevant by his comments. My post was a question and not intended to be an answer.

Without really intending to downplay your observation, I suspect that a sizable majority of Mac users searching for troubleshooting help don't google on such general phrases as "mac troubleshooting forum," but rather on specific keywords like "blue screen," "duplicate menu entries," etc.

When I'm looking for gadening info such as, say, how to cure onions, I don't search for gardening forums; I search for "curing onions."

That's not to say the more general hits aren't of value. People putting together lists of resources for Mac users, for example, may well search on such phrases.

I agree. My search was deliberately sent without quotes to search for anything with any one of those words. It was in essence a broader search than searching on a phrase, but I was just interested to see what would happen.

How about if FTM's pages had tags which did the opposite of "nofollow"?

I was noticing that some sites use various "<meta " tags:

• apple.com/
  
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-us" lang="en-us">
  <head>
      <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
      <title>Apple</title>
      <meta name="Keywords" content="Apple" />
      <meta name="Description" content="Apple designs and creates iPod and iTunes, Mac laptop and desktop computers, the OS X operating system, and the revolutionary iPhone." />
  
  
  
   
• macworld.com/news.html
  
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
      <title>Apple, Mac, iPod and iPhone News | Macworld</title>
      <meta name="description" content="Up to the minute news on the latest apple products including Mac computers and software, iPhones and iPods." />
  
  
  
   
• macintouch.com/
  
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
  <html>
  <head>
      <title>MacInTouch: timely news and tips about Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPhone and more...</title>
      <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
      <meta name="description" content="The MacInTouch Home Page is the original Mac news site, providing timely, reliable news, information and analysis about Apple Macintosh systems since 1994, plus iTunes, iPod, iPhone and Mac OS X.">
      <meta name="keywords" content="Macintosh, Mac, MacInTouch, Apple, AAPL, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac OS X">
  
  
  
   
  And even the extremely talented Amit Singh...
   
• kernelthread.com/projects/
  
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
      <meta name="Description" content="Amit, Singh, Amit Singh, Embedded, Hanoi, Hanoimania, Operating Systems, Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HURD, Bootloader, Programming, Programming Languages, Networking, Operating Systems, Protocols, TCP/IP, Publications, GNU, GPL, Publications, Resume, Virtualization, Virtualisation, Kernel, Device Driver, Hardware, Software, Data Networking, IIT, IITD, IIT-D, IIT Delhi, Delhi, Bay Area, Bell Labs, Bell Laboratories, Lucent, Eclipse, Eclipse/BSD, Quality of Service, QoS, Guaranteed Service, Schedulers, CPU, Disk, Fair Share" />
      <meta name="keywords" content="Amit, Singh, Amit Singh, Embedded, Hanoi, Hanoimania, Operating Systems, Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HURD, Bootloader, Programming, Programming Languages, Networking, Operating Systems, Protocols, TCP/IP, Publications, GNU, GPL, Publications, Resume, Virtualization, Virtualisation, Kernel, Device Driver, Hardware, Software, Data Networking, IIT, IITD, IIT-D, IIT Delhi, Delhi, Bay Area, Bell Labs, Bell Laboratories, Lucent, Eclipse, Eclipse/BSD, Quality of Service, QoS, Guaranteed Service, Schedulers, CPU, Disk, Fair Share" />
      <title>Amit Singh: Projects</title>

Might such keywords and/or description meta-tags provide any boost?

You are definitely right. However, what is good here, is dynamics! A couple of months ago the same terms could barely find FTM in the first 100; now it is on the 10th-11th place. Hope this change reflects the actual popularity index.

Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines totally disregard keyword META tags and other similar tags, because they're too easy to abuse. (Back when the keyword tag first got invented, porn sites would stuff their pages full of thousands of meta tags in the hopes of turning up on more Google keyword searches.)

The basic lesson here is that search engines can not rely on any user-generated content to determine page rankings, because someone somewhere will game the system if they do.

These days, META tags are kind of a superstition, a holdover from earlier, more innocent days of the Web. Google will pay limited attention to the Description tag, particularly for ecommerce sites (for example, it will pull product names from a Description tag) but totally disregards keyword tags. Google says the presence or absence of any META tags, including the Description tag, has no effect at all on search engine results or ranking, but only on the snippet of text that's shown when a search has already found the site.