031 — Appeasing the SEO Gods

Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner. This is the All Play podcast. So I've been working on some more stuff.

I'm gonna dive into some updates that I've rolled out on starterpacks.net and the results that I'm getting back so far, and we'll go from there. So I think in the last episode, I had talked about rolling out the new, like, quick starter pack editor. I did roll out a few more updates on there, so now it'll it'll prevent people from adding duplicate entries to that to new starter packs. Not that those are ever actually added on Blue Sky, but, no longer will it be allowed to be added on the starterpackstarterpacks.net side. It'll prevent any multiples from being added to the strip below and, it also knows allows you to remove people that you potentially added by mistake before adding that creating that new pack.

So I think that's just a nice little tweak that it roll rolled out. And, there's a few other little odds and ends that I'm gonna be adding to the editor, essentially being able to basically edit an existing starter pack. So edit the name, edit the description, and remove people from an existing pack all from starterpacksstarterpacks.net. So that'll be coming out soon. Still tweaking that and, but things are looking good and, you know, just kinda inching along as far as adding features to the site.

Now on the indexing and, I guess basically just kind of like trying to boost up the SEO of the site, I think things are actually progressing pretty well. So looking at the numbers right now, it's when before I started doing those updates, I was down to about 3,000 or so pages that were indexed via, the you know, I'm looking in Google Search Console. That was out of a total of 3,300,000 potential pages that could be indexed. And back in January, I actually had almost a million pages indexed, but for whatever reason over, you know, the last couple months, that has kind of like dwindled down to about 3,000. Then I rolled out some tweaks.

I basically tried to take every single page on the site and make it to where it is. The majority of the content is server side rendered so that first that first page is basically getting, you know, as much as the profile, as much of the starter packs, as much as, like, the, people that a person follows as far as on the profiles. The starter packs themselves are loading the general starter pack information as well as the first fifty or so, you know, people that are within that starter pack. And so those changes went out. I then basically had it to where all of those now include links to these sub pages.

And now every page, there's words like basically like a paginated entry where so for instance, the file you know, so the number of people or the people that, the list of people that you follow, it'll load the first fifty, and then obviously, as you scroll, it'll load fifty fifty fifty. There's a link that'll take people to sub pages, and it'll be 50 per page, and, the crawlers can follow that link and basically kinda find it. What's interesting is, I then once I rolled all this stuff out, I started to kind of trying to revalidate some of the errors that I was seeing in in Google Search Console, like some of the soft four zero fours or the five hundreds that were no longer valid or just rebooting the unindexed pages. And when I first started doing that, actually, I kinda got a little bit worried. Some of the numbers dipped.

And so from my 3,000 pages, it went down to like 2,100 pages. And I feel like that's kinda my naivete or whatever, my my noob level thing with Google Google Search Console. I've never really been, other than just kind of like implementing certain things for like marketing purposes, I've never really kind of like had to try to go in and really optimize the SEO of a site or the crawlability. I've done crawlability, but never had to really worry about the numbers and and deal with the the Google Search Console side. So, tweaking that now, I I I got a little bit worried, but, after kind of addressing a few different things on the site, also making sure that, pages were properly four zero four ing if there was no information coming back from Blue Sky, that those numbers went from, like, you know, 3,300 pages down to 2,100 pages.

But since then, it's actually bumped back up to I think it's at about 17,000 pages. So I was I dipped down to 3,000. It's at 17,000, and I know that the crawlers are crawling because when I look at the, access logs for the site, now the the actual numbers of people who are visiting the site is nowhere near this, but I'd say I'm getting about 10,000 requests every twenty minutes. I'm just doing like the the the twenty four hour breakdown, looking at the access logs. And so for every twenty minute span, there's about 10,000 requests to the site.

So I think that's basically Google and who knows, other crawlers potentially that are just kinda going in and and checking these things out. So I'm really, you know, fingers crossed. I'm gonna see that 17,000 jump up to more assuming that I'm fulfilling my, you know, browser, my browsability duties and Google finds the content interesting. So, yeah, on that front, I think things are looking good. Now, I don't really know what else I can do other than just try to get more backlinks to the site and do some things like that.

So I am gonna start publishing some updates over on like Indie Hackers and I think I'm pretty close to actually maybe even dropping a link on, I don't know, Hacker News and and see about maybe even doing like a little product hunt drive to the site. I don't know. I'm I'm a little bit torn on that. I kinda just wanna work on some other stuff in the meantime, and just see where things go from just a normal organic traffic, SEO index, you know, kinda like, how how good can I kinda craft it to where both like Google and AIs and all this other stuff are potentially driving traffic to to starter packs and then see about basically beefing up the the subscriptions and just the general offering? But a lot of tweaks going on on that front, but I kinda wanna take a little step back.

So the two things that I'm kinda ping ponging in between is the I don't know. I kinda wanna build basically, like, the the Axe or Twitter spaces for Blue Sky and actually have it be more of an open platform, so kind of like, I don't know. Spaces is kind of like Clubhouse, but, you know, the Clubhouse app, it was just always kinda weird that it was, like, stuck in this app. Even Twitter spaces, you know, if you weren't actually on Twitter, you didn't really know about it. I mean, maybe you got a push notification if you had those enabled.

I think there's something there to to where it could be interesting about having almost kind of like a not necessarily decentralized, but something to where it's a conversation space that is targeted. And I guess I would start with Blue Sky just just just because I already have so much there. And, I think I could probably get pretty quick up and running as far as the OAuth and some ties into being able to, send messages or push notifications when certain events are happening. So yeah. So I I kinda wanna do that.

I also kinda wanna play around with, like, a posting app, like a really, like, posting app where I can post out across multiple networks and see how that might go. I don't know. I just wanna I wanna tinker on something. And at this point, I feel like the things that I need to work on for starter packs is really just the stuff that I'm not really, like, quite that interested in right now. So I guess I'm kind of at a crossroads where I'm gonna try to figure out what that next thing is.

I will do some live streaming while I this stuff. So if you're interested into seeing a a new project get spun up, I'm gonna do some live streams on on YouTube and Twitch and stuff. And I might even, see if, Ecamm can tap into stream. Place, which is like a basically a streaming platform that's based on the the AT pro protocol, and we'll see where that goes. But quick little update on starter packs, how that's doing on SEO front, some numbers, and catch the livestream if you wanna see which project I end up tinkering on next.

And if it's interesting to you, we can dive in and jam out together. So with that, I'm Ryan Hefner. This is the All Play podcast. You can find episodes at allplay.fm, and I hope to see you on the livestream soon. So hop on in, share what project you're working on.

Obviously, I'll do the same and if you wanna, ask any questions or or just, you know, have questions that you have for your project, let me know and we'll just jam on some livestreams together. Alright. Have a great one. Later.