John Kettler Posted December 30, 2009 Share Posted December 30, 2009 BFC, Before the decision was made to shut down the HW:LG forum, was any thought given to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) impact on the overall BFC site? The immense, ever increasing amount of rich content was generating tons of quality backlinks, in turn and progressively raising your Google rankings. This is a process Internet marketers often pay big bucks to achieve (my business partner and I have spent thousands of dollars and cubic hours on such exercises ourselves), and the scale of your organic activities simply dwarfed most marketing programs, let alone what it would take to do the same via Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising And your traffic, except for paid Mod presence and bandwidth, was practically free, with us generating the content! When you shut down that Forum, in very short order you lost a lot of Google horsepower. This wasn't just rankings, but a chance to expose people to your site, thus your product line, they might otherwise never encounter. In other words, all those abstruse discussions of Grouchy's skills and what doubleshotted canister could do were driving traffic to your site, creating opportunities for people to see what other interesting and exciting things you had to offer. Enough such exposures, and people start buying items from you. And you know what kind of loyal customers your games create! Two ideas for you to consider: 1) Restart the HW:LG forum, preferably after hammering out an affiliate agreement with JMM so people can order the game from here (JMM would ship, handle problems, etc.), with BFC making money on every such order via its unique affiliate link. Seems only fair, since you'd be the ones generating the traffic via all that high quality grog content in the posts; 2) If 1) isn't doable for some reason, my business partner and I think you could monetize the now dead Forum by putting the content on a disc and/or digital download and selling it. There was lots of meaty stuff there, and it seems a shame to just lose it. I learned an awful lot from reading the posts there, the discussions were first rate, and some deep research went into some of those posts, such as my many hours spent running down imagery of period carriages and other wheeled vehicles to support the in game modeling of same. I welcome your response to both my question and my ideas. Regards, John Kettler Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted December 30, 2009 Share Posted December 30, 2009 John, Can you be quite certain that that data even still exists? My naïve assumption was that whenever a forum is shut down, its content is erased/written over on the server. Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pak_43 Posted December 30, 2009 Share Posted December 30, 2009 Nah, you can close a forum down and not allow anyone to post on it without removing the data (which isn't to say BF haven't done that..) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Kettler Posted December 31, 2009 Author Share Posted December 31, 2009 Michael Emrys, I can't be certain it isn't gone, but if I didn't ask, how'd we ever know? Pak_43, I fervently hope they just shut it down and didn't overwrite! Regards, John Kettler Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted January 2, 2010 Share Posted January 2, 2010 We've addressed this several times already. We have no right or incentive to host the content any longer as we are no longer publishing the game. Under no circumstances would we be able to sell it even if we felt it was worth the effort (and we do not). It's not open for discussion or reversal. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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