The Bailoutville Experiment

[Andy R]

I got word that some of you were wondering what the link under the ad was for the Bailoutville Experiment. Basically a friend called me about an idea to setup a place for all the people to talk about issues related to the Government Bailout going on. I thought this would be a good exercise for me to test out my Search Engine Optimization skills to see if I could get the site ranking high in the search engines within a couple weeks. I also thought it might be a good place for some of our members who really want to obsess with details of the bailout that fallout side of the FIRE scope. Obviously we have the Soapbox and FIREY & Money areas of this site for these discussions too.

The Bailoutville Experiment is setup unlike any other forum I have worked with where you can post without registering. It's only been online for about 24 hours (at time of this post) and traffic is slowly building and we are already #1 in Google for the search phrase "Bailout Discussions" (link).

If you want to obsess about the Bailout then please setup an account and chime in on Bailoutville.com. It might be kind of fun to see where this experiment is in a couple weeks.

Click here to visit the Bailoutville Experiment. A place to obsess about all the non FIRE details of the Bailout.

[yakers]

Originally Posted by Andy R

It might be kind of fun to see where this experiment is in a couple weeks.

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Heck, it'll be interesting to see how the 'real' bailout experiment works out, not looking so god on the first day.

[slouch]

Originally Posted by Andy R

I thought this would be a good exercise for me to test out my Search Engine Optimization skills to see if I could get the site ranking high in the search engines within a couple weeks.

Unless you're shelling out for adWords, you won't make it on google top search results in a few weeks. Even with vbSEO tweaks you still need

1. lots of sites linking to yours
2. time to pass

for your PageRank value to increase.

[Andy R]

Slouch,

You are probably right for keywords that have authority already but it seems there might be some wiggle room on this one. For me it's a fun experiment. My friend Eric is "working the blogs' and trying to recruit back links from many of them. Heck, a day after we already are ranking and have some organic search traffic. vBSEO is just a tiny part of the SEO. Most of it is from "old school" things like H1 tags, keyword density, and of course links back with strong anchor text relevancy. We are also submitting sitemaps to Google and Yahoo, so that will help to. To me the most interesting part is not the SEO but to see how a forum that allows guests to post will fare.

[Nords]

Is E-R.org really the appropriate place to run this experiment? Do we really need to attract even more attention to the board, to make it require even more server bandwidth and other resources? Or aren't the moderators working hard enough on the spam & trolls already?

If this experiment is being run for profit, then how do E-R.org or the members benefit?

Do we really need to see the ad on every single freakin' page of the whole website? (Smells like spam no matter who's cooking it.) Perhaps instead of getting that in our faces with every refresh, the ad could be relegated to the rotating series in the upper-right-hand corner.

[Andy R]

Originally Posted by Nords

Is E-R.org really the appropriate place to run this experiment?

Well I do think some of the members here might want to talk about issues regarding the bailout beyond those related to FIRE. One idea was to try and focus some of the non-FIRE discussions from here to reduce the "signal to noise ratio". Do you think the Yoga site would be more relevant?

Originally Posted by Nords

Do we really need to attract even more attention to the board, to make it require even more server bandwidth and other resources?

It's running on a different server. I think the link back to us is certainly not going to bog down our server(s).

Originally Posted by Nords

Or aren't the moderators working hard enough on the spam & trolls already?

If this causes any extra work for the mods I'll stop the experiment...

Originally Posted by Nords

If this experiment is being run for profit, then how do E-R.org or the members benefit?

If they want to talk economics or other issues maybe they will be interested in the discussions there, maybe not?

[Sarah in SC]

Seems like an interesting experiment. I remember my job running some web squirrels back in the day and really enjoying the SEO stuff and learning about how search works.
Should be very enlightening to see how the guest posting works, too.

[Nords]

Originally Posted by Andy R

Well I do think some of the members here might want to talk about issues regarding the bailout beyond those related to FIRE. One idea was to try and focus some of the non-FIRE discussions from here to reduce the "signal to noise ratio". Do you think the Yoga site would be more relevant?

No, I'm not questioning the topic. My point is that if this is an experiment in SEO then perhaps it could be run on another group of guinea pigs. I don't appreciate having more ads pop up like that and I don't see how the experiment benefits E-R.org.

Now, if you're planning offload the Soapbox to another server, that seems like a great idea. It could be called "Soapbox" instead of "Bailoutville" and it could offload all the content that the E-R.org moderators don't enjoy moderating. And since Soapbox content rarely has anything to do with FIRE, anyway, even the Yoga audience might find it compelling.

[ladelfina]

Soapbox content rarely has anything to do with FIRE, anyway, even the Yoga audience might find it compelling.

I think yoga is kind of the antithesis of soapbox thinking..! More likely that the people stressed out from the SoapBox seek refuge at the yoga joint than vice-versa..

[Sarah in SC]

Guinea pigs? Darn, and I just replaced my marmot picture!
Funny about yoga, I had two friends have a moderately sized disagreement last night over which kind of yoga was "best", the one where you are doing yoga for exercise or the one focused on meditation and relaxation. Ever the mediator, I offered that they didn't have to go to the same class! I didn't even know there were different kinds of yoga, so maybe I need to head on over to the yoga forum!

[ladelfina]

Sarah, I've only been to a very traditional (I assume Hatha) Yoga practice. It wasn't given a name. But in the States there seem to be a lot of competing 'brands'. The most famous recently is "hot" yoga (done in a superheated room). It's famous, or rather infamous, because its promoter (Bikram?) has been trying to copyright centuries-old positions, blocking others -with court injunctions- from teaching his special sequences or some such nonsense..

There are probably many more but I have also heard of "flow" yoga, Kundalini yoga, Iyengar yoga, etc.

One "correct" answer to which is best is, on the one hand, whatever suits one's needs at the time. The more 'yogic' answer, I would say, is that an incorporation of breathing and meditation is just as important as sheer physical control or exertion; they should go hand-in-hand. And that's not even getting into the philosophical/spiritual/karmic/everyday life aspects .. which are also part of the "union" or uniting (yoga).

You did well to defuse the argument, anyway! That should reflect well on your karma.. even if the two sides did not unite in agreement.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I was trying to find some photos of some mean looking "yoga gangs", but was very unsuccessful. Lots of other good pictures though.

[ladelfina]

ooo they can get rough!.. (err.. relatively speaking)
There are competitions, too, which seems pretty antithetical to the whole thing.

There's a documentary, "Yoga, Inc." that gets into all this.

clips here:
http://www.baddogtales.com/BadDogTal...0/Archive.html

Seems it is restricted to TV channels and conventional distribution, though I'm sure I watched the whole thing online many months ago or even last year. Maybe that was before the documentary itself got any commercial notice. Nope, I remember now that it was on some SKY satellite channel here.