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Question about Guests

Started by LX346, October 13, 2018, 12:58:42 PM

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LX346

New user here. I will be setting one up soon. In looking at some other Simple Machine Forums already set up, a few of them have very high Guest numbers with low logged-in User numbers (example, a dozen or less Users and 200-300 Guests, consistently throughout the day). Other Simple Machine Forums have 20-30 logged-in users and have Guests in the 20-50 range.

I know spiders, bots, and visitors on the page but not logged-in, account for most of the Guest numbers. Search engine bots and spiders would be desirable in my case, so I was wondering what the forums with the high Guest counts are doing that the forums with the lower Guest counts are not?

In searching the forum here, I did see where there was a mod that you could add fake numbers to the Guest count. I won't be doing that as I want real numbers and I am wondering if that is why a few forums show the seemingly high Guest counts or is there something else that they are doing to increase visibility?

Looking

Count could be based on how long Admin measures a user as logged in. So if the measure was 24 hours it would look like many were online. It could also be spiders, bots or the site has content everyone wants to see.

GigaWatt

Quote from: LX346 on October 13, 2018, 12:58:42 PM
I won't be doing that as I want real numbers and I am wondering if that is why a few forums show the seemingly high Guest counts or is there something else that they are doing to increase visibility?

As far as I know, most SMF forums don't use the fake guest count mod. Many of them have been crawled over time, so search engines have them in their database.

One of the things you could do to increase the number of hits on your forum is use SSL (https instead of http). Another thing you could do is submit your URL to search engines. Diggza offers bulk submittal of your URL to a number of search engines ;).
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

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