My two favorite online forums for SEO are SEOchat and DigitalPoint. What do you think are the main differences b/w the two.
Guy, If you're referring to all the ads on SEOC, I agree. I can understand a certain degree of advertising, but when it gets to the point that my page downloads take forever, then it gets ridicolous.
Woah. I just had a mad moment of fryman / shoemoney confusion. I though he/they were talking to themselves. Closer inspection revueals that their avatars aren't all that similar
Seo chat is SOOOOOOOO slow...every tool takes an hour to load, and their forums and full of crap...and they take forever to load as well. they have WAAAY to much code in their forums. Look at this crap: Diagnosis Global Statistics Total HTTP Requests: 63 Total Size: 141771 bytes Object Size Totals Object type Size (bytes) HTML: 24185 HTML Images: 49256 CSS Images: 1261 Total Images: 50517 Javascript: 41758 CSS: 4975 Multimedia: 20336 Other: 0 External Objects External Object QTY Total HTML: 1 Total HTML Images: 53 Total CSS Images: 2 Total Images: 55 Total Scripts: 4 Total CSS imports: 2 Total Frames: 0 Total Iframes: 0 Download Times* Connection Rate Download Time 14.4K 110.28 seconds 28.8K 55.34 seconds 33.6K 47.49 seconds 56K 28.65 seconds ISDN 128K 9.05 seconds T1 1.44Mbps 1.15 seconds taken from http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Yes, that's what I talking about. In terms of content and entertainment value, both forums are pretty good in those areas.
I gave up on seochat mainly because of the ads. The final straw was a creepy face talking to me on every single page. I don't mind ads; but the ones that move and such I don't like. Then the new stuff they added: Time spent in forums Reputation Power And comments in the middle of posts , ie: Comments on this post so and so agrees It just takes away from the forum experience. Kind of high school like. I do still research there; but rarely login anymore. I've been a member since 2004 and still don't have a 100 posts.
I prefer this forum but have lately rediscovered seochat as well. There is a lot of good info on there once you figgure out whose advice you should take and who to rather ignore.
It's sad to see how the quality of search engine forums seems to go down after a while. Having been on those for the past 5 years I cannot remember one that managed to keep up it's quality. Let's not let that happen to Digitalpoint
perhaps its becuase forums get a little success and chase after the dollar? It seems dp is different becuase its alreayd well established business wise maybe?
Sometimes it is also that the overall vibe goes down and discourages knowledgable people from having the desire to share good info. You need a good combination of fun and knowledge. That is the way to stay afloat.
One thing that also discourages good conversation is when forums have a few members talking to one another in every thread without ever bringing in new info, questions and debates. The last new forum I have joined was this one http://www.web-mastery.net/ and the first thing I am noticing that in every thread the same people (moderators) are talking to one another and the new members don't really participate. That is really bad. A lot of forums are merely there to get affiliate money from visitors. The forums rank due to content created but the flow is not there.