J2O "Promotion"

[Paul]

It is unfortunate that searching for Jazz Jackrabbit on most major search engines doesn't yield J2O anywhere near the top. It wouldn't take much to remedy this--and I believe that especially with a new Jazz game coming out it is vital to get and keep the people who might be attracted to Jazz by it. A search on Google for "Jazz Jackrabbit" yields the JJ3 page on J2O before the main site.

1) Meta tags. There aren't any! To J2O admins : get some keywords up there! C'mon now. (;

2) Page title. The index for www.jazz2online.com has the title "Jazz2online." That's not something that screams out "click meh!" when you see it in a search result. It should be something in the vein of "Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online - Jazz Jackrabbit news, downloads, and more."

3) Search engine submission. Have you done this? If not, you ought to. And not one of those "submit to 10,235 search engines at once" thingies. Submit to the good ones and do it with care.

4) Google rankings can be improved by having sites link to J2O with the text "Jazz Jackrabbit" or whatever the preferred search term is. The more of these links there are and the more frequently they are updated the better the rankings will be.

[Link]

Changing the DMOZ description for J2O might yield it higher in search engines (well google at least). Right now it is "Offers information, message board, downloads, and links." I think it might even do it if I just add the words "Jazz Jackrabbit" in there. If you look at the category (http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Platform/Jazz_Jackrabbit_Series/), a lot of the sites have "Jazz Jackrabbit" in their descriptions, and they come up higher on the search engine.

I'll change the description to "Offers Jazz Jackrabbit information, message board, downloads, and links." for now, but I would like some suggestions for a better description.

[Trafton]

I did a search for Jazz Jackrabbit 2 on some major search engines and logged where Jazz2Online placed. The results:
Google: 54th
Yahoo: 35th
AltaVista: 34th (Info on Jazz 2 from Jazz2Online was actually 34th, the main page wasn't even found)
Ask Jeeves: 4th
Fast/All-The-Web: 13th
Lycos: 11th
Excite: NOT FOUND
Hotbot: 23rd
Teoma: 6th
CNET Search: NOT FOUND
Infoseek: NOT FOUND

The Google and Excite results are especially distressing. In Google's index, Jazz2Online is ranked number one in the JJ2 category. However, because of the lack of mentions of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (use of abbreviations instead, etc.) it is only 54th, behind Overlord's site and even Alberto's JJ2 FAQ (Alberto's FAQ got higher placement than J2O on almost every search engine, in fact.) Excite didn't find it when searching for "Jazz Jackrabbit 2", even though a search for "Jazz2Online" showed that it does, in fact, index J2O. CNET Search, a metasearch engine (searches many search engines) found Sillywabbits and the TF clansite yet did not find Jazz2Online. A search for "Jazz2Online" revealed that, in fact, it doesn't index Jazz2Online at all. Infoseek, which is now Go.com and owned by Overture is a fee-based search engine where web sites pay for placement. The first page of results for my search did not show J2O. Clicking on "more results" lead to a corporate page for reasons unknown. When searching for "Jazz2Online" it found J2O as the first result - under sponsered links. If J2O is, in fact, paying for placement, I would at least expect that it would be found when "Jazz Jackrabbit 2" is searched. I dobut anyone would fine the site without actually really trying right now or hearing about it from someone. Yahoo! and Google, being the top two search engines, are very important. It would be hard for someone to find J2O on them without trying. Make the site more search-engine friendly and it might get some more active community members, which would be really good. Just a thought to consider.

And also: make sure to use Jazz Jackrabbit 2 instead of Jazz Jackrabbit. It will then display if people search for "Jazz Jackrabbit 2".

[Link]

Even a little description of J2O near the top on the main page would help. Maybe in that empty-looking "Submit News" bar, put "The number one Jazz Jackrabbit 2 site!", or something like that.

Because the first text that search engines see is whatever news post is at the top, and often in these there will only be abbreviations like "JJ2". Also, sites like Google will show an excerpt from the site, and a proper description would be better at attracting people than a snippet from the middle of a news post.

Something else which we may want to consider is payed advertising. Google has a good advertising system (http://www.google.ca/ads/), and it would be really easy to make one of those side boxes display when certain keywords are entered. The good thing about these is that they are cost-per-click, up to a set maximum, so you only pay for how many people actually click on the ad. This is what I'm talking about:

http://link.idlegames.com/j2hg/jj2_ad.png

[Paul]

Good ideas all.

I'd be willing to shell out a few bucks to fund such targeted Google advertising...

[FQuist]

Thank you for the suggestions. I just added this:

<title>Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online(Jazz2online) - Jazz Jackrabbit news, information, downloads, and more</title>
<META name="description" content="The #1 Jazz Jackrabbit site. Jazz Jackrabbit news, information, downloads, and more">
<META name="keywords" content="Jazz Jackrabbit, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Jazz Jackrabbit GBA, Jazz2, Jazz creation station, JCS, JJ2">

Yes, I did submit it to Google and Yahoo a couple of times, to no avail. :P

Barely any sites link to Jazz2Online. We get no referrals from other jj2 sites. We do get lots of people on our site through jazz jackrabbit searches in search engines, though. We also get people looking for (pictures of naked people) and warez, somehow. I dunno why we show up on such queries. :O

[Trafton]

It is already on both Google and Yahoo!, just low-ranked. It would take about a month to a month and a half to appear if it was a new submission. I'm sure that adding these keywords will really help, but it will take until the next search engine update (1 month maximum) to see the final results. When I get them, I'll post them here. :)

[FQuist]

the last google update on j2o was friday, so it will take a while.

[Trafton]

Some sites take shorter times than others to update. My trusty Google toolbar says that J2O has a page rating of only 5. Actually, J2O is about a 6 or 7 in truth, but apparently not enough sites link to it. If we could get some high-ranked sites to link to it, it would get a higher pagerank. Plus, sites that are page ranked higher index faster. Here's an examply: there was some new Jazz game and both Site A (let's call it "Jazz 2 Depot") and Site B ("Little Billy's Happy Jazz 2 site") both posted the news at the same time. Jazz 2 Depot, however, had a PageRank of 7, while Little Billy's site wasn't considered important enough to deserve a pagerank. Jazz 2 Depot would get their Google entry updated more often than Little Billy's tiny site, so that there will be little time (even less than a week, even) before searches for this new Jazz game will return results from Jazz 2 Depot, while it would take around a month before Little Billy's site was found because it was ranked lower. And even then, it would probably (unless Little Billy wrote the name of the game all over the page) list Jazz 2 Depot higher than Little Billy's site. The same with Jazz2Online and the other Jazz sites. The higher the page rank, the better. Five is sort of low. The old AT site had six, and...well...it hadn't been updated for ages.

[FQuist]

Making a site show up on search engines often becomes a big issue in web development projects. One method which doesn’t work is meta keywords. According to Danny Sullivan from Clickz, the only major crawler-based search engine supporting meta keywords is Inktomi – and they are not giving it too much weight. The meta keywords has been shown to be a spam magnet and search engines, such as Excite, Lycos and AltaVista have dropped their support while Google and FAST never added it at all.

So, the only reason left for adding meta keywords is to avoid being spammed by fishy search engine optimizer companies.

[Trafton]

Congratulations. Jazz2Online has now moved up 48 spots and is now the 6th returned result on Google. YaY for FQuist.

[FQuist]

Woah, that's a huge change

[Fawriel]

Am I mistaken or do I get pop-ups from the JCF recently? o_o

[Derby]

Those are the symptoms of an ad-oriented virus or trojan. They range from Ad-Clicker to JSNoClose. Run a scan on your system with the latest virus definitions.

[Trafton]

Here are some of the searches redone:
Google: 6th
Yahoo: 5th
AltaVista: 30th (now the main site is higher, but these results are still fairly poor)
Ask Jeeves: 4th (not yet updated, the main story is still Jazz 2 Community Junk.)
Fast/AllTheWeb: 12th (not yet updated, but now 12th because another site was moved down. The current headline is Kejero's Tomb Rabbit 2 project.)
Lycos: 11th (also not yet updated, the current headline is Kejero's Tomb Rabbit 2 project.)
Excite: 9th
Hotbot: 38th (large fall, but not yet updated, still on New GBA Article.)
Teoma: 6th (not yet updated, still on Jazz Community Junk.)
CNET Search: NOT FOUND (Still not yet updated, being a metasearch, it may be a while before J2O is crawled.)
Infoseek: NOT FOUND

These are generally really good surprises. I was especially amazed at the jump in returns on Google and Yahoo!, the two most popular search engines. For some reason, it tumbled on Hotbot, but it has not been updated yet and will probably jump when it is. It was found by Excite this time, and 9th is not bad at all. I'm not sure why AltaVista is still finding it so low, even though it has been updated. Infoseek is pay-for-placement, meaning you'd have to pay to be listed at all. CNET Search found it on a search for "Jazz2Online" but not "Jazz Jackrabbit 2". It just may be a while before it updates. It looks like the META tags and header change were sucessful. :)

And Piccolo: JCF has no popups. Run a spyware scanner. JS.NoClose should not cause popups to just appear out of nowhere. JS.NoClose is a detection of a popup that refuses to close. You should not get these on the JCF. They usually come from unscrupulous sites. However, Ad-Clicker and any other spyware program is a distinct possibility. Ad-Clicker and NoClose are detected by many antivirus programs, but you should download Ad-Aware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/) for more complete protection.

[Paul]

Originally posted by Fquist
Woah, that's a huge change

It's the page title.

[Trafton]

Originally posted by Paul
It's the page title.
Paul is right. It was pretty much entirely the page title. But getting a better PageRank, etc. would help, too.

[Bobby aka Dizzy]

Jazz 2 when put into google gives Jazz2online as the first result. That's great.

[Trafton]

YaY.

Some various searches:
Jazz Jackrabbit - 12th
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - 7th
Jazz 2 - 1st
JJ2 - 110th

Not bad at all, though it probably wouldn't kill to get Jazz Jackrabbit searches to display it on the first page.

[Bobby aka Dizzy]

We've been making progress every week though, so I don't see any reason to not keep going up.

[Trafton]

Originally posted by Bobby aka Dizzy
We've been making progress every week though, so I don't see any reason to not keep going up.
The higher you get, the harder it is to make progress. Also, it will slow down. In about a month, J2O will probably have stalled somewhere on the list, not too much higher up. Even if it is rising, it would still be a good idea to add Jazz Jackrabbit to the META keywords, just because some people might search for Jazz Jackrabbit without the 2. People who are more farmiliar with Jazz are more likely to use Jazz 2 as a search term, while people who are new to the game, who we want to get to the page, would likely either search for Jazz Jackrabbit or Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Just a thought.

[Paul]

You may notice that J2O now shows up near the top on MSN, and looksmart. No, I didn't pay for it...I'm a Zealot (www.zeal.com)

[FQuist]

Cool. :D

[Trafton]

Originally posted by Paul
You may notice that J2O now shows up near the top on MSN, and looksmart. No, I didn't pay for it...I'm a Zealot (www.zeal.com)
Very cool indeed. Thank you for all you've been doing Paul, this is a great help to J2O and the JCF. I'm trying to talk my parents into donating to the Google Adwords cost, as I feel as a user of the JCF that you are doing a great favor to us. If I can convince them, I'll try to pay some, but I don't get much money from allowence.

[Trafton]

Hate to be Mr. Reviver, but I've noticed Jazz2Online's Google entry has reverted its title to "Jazz2Online" causing a sharp fall in placement. I didn't notice the page title changing, so why is it doing this?