CrazyEngineers Layout Update - We're Back To Square One

Replies

• 

  lal

  Well I was a regular user of side bar, though I wished the new topics shuffled there more often. I meant, in a day whenever I looked at the side bar its the same topics listed.
  And its probably the first time I clicked "what's new?"😁 To be honest, "what's new?" seems to be much better than the side bar now. I don't know why I never used it all this while.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Technically - the sidebar added more queries and made the whole thing slower. That's why we had no option but to use 'caching' for the threads. That allowed us not overloading the server (we had server downtimes after we went live without caching). I admit that few of the users did use the sidebar regularly and some of you even wrote to me saying that the new threads were not getting updated in real time. This actually made lot of people use it lesser than we'd have loved.
  
  "What's New?" has its own dedicated page and is well optimised and members instantly get updated about the latest threads, there's zero lag between creation of new thread and it being reflected in the What's new section.
  
  One of the features that we were planning for VoiCE was displaying our latest VoiCE posts. We had done the basic work on this; but looks like we'll have to bring in something newer and better.
• 

  Saandeep Sreerambatla

  With Side bar or without, we stick here! And yes I understand the term dancing to search engines!! So we are with you Biggie.
  And yeah, waiting for the Great news!!
• 

  Jeffrey Arulraj

  Man I have been through these crunchy moments you know especially as a Sound Engineer
  
  Our Audio mixer started to fail we had no idea why we tried every method possible from reinstating all the interiors and all. But we could not solve that issue . But that never put us down we just decided that we need move further on without considering the cost or price we have to pay and changed the whole system at a cost of about 3 lakhs
  
  Initially a change was the last resort but we had to go through
  
  But we all know one thing how ever costly it is we must learn to live with a change you may never know It may truly be a blessing in disguise
  
  I am proud of how CE is No matter what is there and what is not
  
  I am glad that I can still debate and discuss my ideas and this setup gives a over all new look to CE
  
  "Wider type area is real cool friend "
  
  Loving what I am doing that makes me happy
  
  Always a
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  #-Link-Snipped-#: Well, yes. In fact I've spent sleepless nights and countless hours understanding what really went wrong and what Google wants us to do. Yes, what they tell you to do makes sense; but implementing their suggestions takes a ton of time and efforts which takes us away from what we're planning. Of course relying on Google isn't a great way to grow a community. We need a rock-solid community that'll stick around even when Google's not around.
  
  I think time's come for us to act faster than ever before and introduce the things we've been planning for a long time. It feels great that we've been able to form a strong community. Now the immediate goal is to grow in size; without Google. If our traffic bounces back after implementing these changes; our growth will accelerate.
  
  We all will experience a step in this direction very soon. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.
• 

  Harshad Italiya

  As Sandy said, We will be with CE forever.
  Love you CE. 😁
• 

  naveee

  we ll fight along wit CE forever 😁
• 

  sweet_honey

  The side bar was good but What's new is better...👍
  
  Always CE has given us new and innovative things..
  So waiting 4 the great news ahead..😀
• 

  Ramani Aswath

  Probably I am old fashioned. I was hardly looking at the side bar. 'What is New?' seems good enough.
  The show must go on come what may.
  
  We are like the 'sticky' threads. We have to be peeled off if CE does not want us.
• 

  pratik varma

  as i am new to c.e...
  i dont know whats going on...
  still...i will always go on with C.E ..
  because i always have faith in the one i choose to be with..
  keep rocking c.e we are always with you : )
• 

  Jeffrey Arulraj

  pratik varma

  as i am new to c.e...
  i dont know whats going on...
  still...i will always go on with C.E ..
  because i always have faith in the one i choose to be with..
  keep rocking c.e we are always with you : )

  Hey Biggie just take a look at this it is the dedication of these people that make CE great never feel what s*** Google try to do against us We cannot be shaken till we have support from our unending tide of crazy engineers around the globe
  
  We are proud of your work and never care for a minor change like this man
  
  Always with you
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  If you read the latest announcements you'll see what's going on here. I however feel really refreshed and energetic to read all the responses here. CEans rule! 👍
• 

  vinod1993

  I am reminded about the story of the king Robert Bruce and the Spider. Here CE is the spider.! No worries we'll be back on track in no time.! 😀
  
• 

  Indrajeet Roy

  I am just a new guy but I love the site. Remember, we were the champions and we will be again!!
• 

  Prashant Munshi

  I am not understanding the blame to Google. How it has contributed to lower traffic. The PR of CE as I could see on a PR tool is still 5/10. What is the exact problem if you elaborately publish here would make all of us share the concern in better way by contributing suggestions to the best of our knowledge. Or we have to also see if the search traffic has decreased overall. A recent news said that there has been some changes to the Google search algorithm but nothing has been clearly disclosed about it.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  The detailed answer would be very technical and need some familiarity with what's Google been doing for a long time. While we have a dedicated community here; our content appears in Google search results as well. Thanks to the members here who've contributed very useful, unique and original content that most of the discussions on CE are ranked very high in Google search results.
  
  We aren't blaming Google because they're doing what they's supposed to do - offer the best possible search results to their users. Google publishes over 500-1000 updates every year that means small algorithm updates are published every day. In the last few months however, Google's Web Spam team has said that they've published few 'major' algorithm updates that affect websites throughout the world. These algorithm updates are named 'Panda' and 'Penguin'. There are other updates as well; but they're out of the scope of this post.
  
  I must admit that CrazyEngineers has stayed out of the 'kick' by Panda and Penguin updates because we've always followed very high standards on this site. In our case, the problem seems to be little different though.
  
  Around 24th of August, we decided to introduce sidebar on all the pages of CE community. Now think of this change from Google spider's perspective. Google spider visits thousands of pages every day on CE; and beginning 24th of August, it started noticing 'different' page than it used to. It also found that this new updated page does not offer any 'useful' information - that'd make it rank better. Since all the pages on CE Community got updated - Google became skeptic about this website and started pushing down our site in rankings.
  
  Addition of the sidebar actually resulted into -
  

  1. More 'code' being fed to Google; not some important 'content' it'd have loved to index.
  2. The content/code ratio went down - which is an important signal out of 200 signals Google uses to rank websites and web pages.
  3. The new pages were not 'more useful' than the older ones.

  That could have been one of the results that we went down in rankings and lost ~40% of our traffic. But since yesterday, I already see that Google's visiting us more and it will take some time before determining that the pages with good content are back and then restore us back in rankings. The whole activity may take weeks.
  I'll of course document everything we've been through once our traffic gets back on track. That way, we'll be sure about the things that may have gone wrong. If you have specific questions, I'll be happy to answer.
• 

  Saandeep Sreerambatla

  I understand that, introducing sidebar is the one which has created the mess. My overall observation!
  
  So, what we have to do?
  
  Going forward any changes to the pages, we need to clearly understand the impact and make the changes. Am I correct?
• 

  Prashant Munshi

  The_Big_K

  The detailed answer would be very technical and need some familiarity with what's Google been doing for a long time. While we have a dedicated community here.....
  

  1. The content/code ratio went down - which is an important signal out of 200 signals Google uses to rank websites and web pages.

  I'll of course document everything we've been through once our traffic gets back on track. That way, we'll be sure about the things that may have gone wrong. If you have specific questions, I'll be happy to answer.

  Thanks for such an elaborate answer. Just wanted to know what should be ideal content/code ratio, is it same as text/code ratio? How to check content/code ratio for a website? Very brief answer please.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  English-Scared

  I understand that, introducing sidebar is the one which has created the mess. My overall observation!
  
  So, what we have to do?
  
  Going forward any changes to the pages, we need to clearly understand the impact and make the changes. Am I correct?

  Unfortunately, no one knows what will work and what won't. But as a safer strategy - we'll keep the current layout as it is; unless we've something really useful to offer for everyone - guests and visitors. That said, removal of sidebar isn't the confirmed solution to the problem. Only time will tell whether we did the right thing. Given the number of changes I've implemented in the recent past; it's going to be difficult to really point out what was the 'one' thing that worked.
  
  
  

  Prashant Munshi

  Thanks for such an elaborate answer. Just wanted to know what should be ideal content/code ratio, is it same as text/code ratio? How to check content/code ratio for a website? Very brief answer please.

  Unfortunately, there's no defined answer to the ideal text/code ratio. Google still relies on 'text' as 'content' heavily and the four characteristics of text are key to ranking well: 'Original', 'Fresh', 'Useful' & 'Informative'. As I said, Google uses 200 different signals to determine the overall worth of any page. The best way is to create original content and let Google determine what to do with it.
  
  Content to code ratio will be judged differently by Google and other visitors. For Google, it's the useful keywords and their context that matters more than anything else, in my opinion.
  
  In recent times, Google's taking a lot of steps to improve their search results. That has affected several websites. I'll of course keep updating the announcements section whenever I've any useful information to share.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Some magic to all those who care for CE. A picture is worth thousand words, right?
  
  
• 

  Ramani Aswath

  The_Big_K

  Some magic to all those who care for CE. A picture is worth thousand words, right?

  Or 10,000 registrations! Just curious, what is the scale of the Y-axis grid? 1000?
• 

  Saandeep Sreerambatla

  Picture is worth many thousand words 😀 way to go!
• 

  Jeffrey Arulraj

  Hope they are in thousands Biggie you truly are a great analyst to pin point the exact error in CE
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  jeffrey samuel

  Hope they are in thousands Biggie you truly are a great analyst to pin point the exact error in CE

  Exact error has not been detected yet and it seems that we'll never know what the exact problem was. One of the solutions we've implemented 'may' work.
• 

  Jeffrey Arulraj

  The_Big_K

  Exact error has not been detected yet and it seems that we'll never know what the exact problem was. One of the solutions we've implemented 'may' work.

  A little positive correction here friend "Has Worked "
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  jeffrey samuel

  A little positive correction here friend "Has Worked "

  It's just the improvement in registration rate we're experiencing. The sidebar removal definitely has affected our registration rate in a positive way. The traffic has jumped a little but we're still long way from getting back to the original levels. I'll of course keep everyone posted about our progress.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Update: We've a positive trend in the traffic. But more important than that; our posting rate has improved and people are contributing great content. Now it's just matter of time before we make another growth story 👍 . Keep creating new, interesting, useful discussions! Will share more information later.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Update: The errors that caused the traffic to go down have all been fixed. We're experimenting with the sidebar on all the pages again. Will update everyone with the proceedings.
• 

  Shailaja Tiwari

  The_Big_K

  Some magic to all those who care for CE. A picture is worth thousand words, right?
  
  

  saw this now.
  well said .
  i wish i knew about this site before.
• 

  ashwin sarangula

  wow. .. great job biggie.......cheers for CE.
  may this number be doubled month by month
• 

  Shatil Ahmed

  Thank your best content. I am very happy to get it here.