[Omniscient]

Just to prove to everyone that I know what the fuck I'm talking about when it comes to SEO and what's been happening with HF activity....here is some data from the past week.

https://screenshots.firefox.com/kqAMLXdv...google.com

That screenshot show the increase in Google search results providing us a solid boost in traffic. We've had a steady 6-8k in Google clicks each day for months. Then this weekend we popped up to 11-13k. That's a huge boost.

The reason why? Because we're mobile friendly and Google is crawling us heavily and indexing our pages. Google has a Mobile First policy which means they want all their results to be mobile friendly.

We've been failing their Mobile Friendly Test for years:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

btw, here is a screenshot of the crawler stats. Google was crawling us under 100k pages per day. We suddenly popped up and each day it's more. Yesterday they crawled 325k pages.

https://screenshots.firefox.com/k1btZbNT...google.com

So all these changes for the layout and the work we're doing in the code for SEO is paying off. I'll keep member updated as things progress but rest assured those talking crap about the demise of HF are idiots. Nothing was wrong with HF that I wasn't aware of that didn't have a fix. At one point an idiot member actually told me to step down and let others run HF.

The plans I have to alter HF are amazing and with Xerotics help things are progressing very well. Most of the painful stuff is over with, like the site redesign. I still have to move the server soon but after that it's mostly smooth sailing with solid work on features.

Enjoy the ride guys because it's going to be a lot of fun from here on out.

[Riot]

I'm strapped in and ready for blastoff. Let the good times roll. 🤝

Btw thank you to Omni and Xerotic for the epic changes.

[Mr. Robot]

Wow dude, I never doubted what you were saying when it came to mobile HF - especially comparing to how much Runescape popped off lately by them releasing a mobile version.

So happy to see the stats going in the right fucking direction, I love this damn forum and only want the best for it. (I will say 9 hours on your promoted tweet killed me inside because I finally took a good 8 hour sleep)

I plan on making a YT video promoting HF - not just one of those shitty look at me talking things but a proper animated one.

[Cognitive]

It is awesome seeing the growth and the changes. Good shit Omni!

[Ømen Xīīī]

That 225K increase in pages tho, hot damn.

Someone even made a thread about this the other day in the lounge saying that he's noticed way more activity the past couple days and didn't know why. I along with others definetely thought the theme had a major part in this boost of acitivity (which now is factually true.)

Loving all the updates you guys are putting into the site, this is the most amount of change (for the better) that I've seen on this site in years.

Keep up all the killer work guys, straight killin it. 👍

[Vitani]

I expected stats to go up after HF turned mobile friendly, but this is far beyond what I imagined. That's a huge boost in traffic!
Keep in mind that we are mobile friendly barely a few weeks. The upcoming few months are going to be great and interesting to see..

[SIMAAS]

Will the pofile section in posts remain that wide or are you planing to make it smaller? I'm not sure if it's only for me, but it looks way too wide. Love the new theme and all the updates!

[Mr. Robot]

I expected stats to go up after HF turned mobile friendly, but this is far beyond what I imagined. That's a huge boost in traffic!
Keep in mind that we are mobile friendly barely a few weeks. The upcoming few months are going to be great and interesting to see..

Yeah but I feel like Omni should add a filter in to look for really common spelling errors + shortening of words and expand them automatically.
:)

Only thing i'd point out is simply threads/tutorials written up on mobile should give extra bytes or some crap because fuck writing all that shit on mobile without an OTG>

[Gay]

If you haven't paid Xerotic a load you should probably go do that now...

[Null]

nice to see you guys doing work on the forums, good luck.

[Central Sky]

Great Forum HF 🤝

[Omniscient]

I plan on making a YT video promoting HF

You should wait till I have the award promotion ready.

I expected stats to go up after HF turned mobile friendly, but this is far beyond what I imagined. That's a huge boost in traffic!

We still have a long road ahead to get to the same traffic level of 2012-2014 before Google made all these SEO policy changes.

It was an April 2015 update that started it all. It was their first Mobile-Friendly update and since then we've suffered in rankings. The decline was slow but it was very very steady. As if little by little Google was pushing me closer to the edge of a cliff without every pushing me over.

I'm just so glad we're finally past the hard work. I still have a lot of SEO to do on the backend which members won't even notice. Little things like nofollow tags and some HTML tidying up for Google to like us even more. Basically some fine-tuning in the process to make sure everything is perfect. I did all this in 2009-2010 and it was partially why HF suceeded where others failed. It's one thing to build a site members like, it's entirely another to build one Google likes. And realistically it's more important Google likes us. I bet that a lot of members found HF through a Google search.

I know it's ultimately my responsibility but I can't help but blame MyBB too. Those clowns still aren't default responsive theme and now that we are, we're essentially split from their branch and will likely never update HF to any newer versions of MyBB. I feel like I waited and waited for them and 1.8x was crap (is crap) and 2.0 never happened and now 1.9x is sitting around with imho a terrible looking responsive theme concept. So we just did the work ourselves but now we're sort of fucked for updating. Probably going to be more of an issue in 5-6 years.

If you want to read a nice history about Googles changes for mobile and SEO read this:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/goog...ly-update/

That more or less highlights what has happened in terms of HF traffic from Google.

[Eagle 95]

I did notice an increased activity in our online list during the day, even tho school started for some of our members.

Good job guys.

[Mr. Robot]

You should wait till I have the award promotion ready.  

I'm not that much of an award whore! :)

But yeah been practicing my animation but might pay someone else to do it. Got a few ideas to make it catchy. 100k views incoming.

Lemme calculate the bytes on that real quick.

[Banter.]

Brilliant work from both you & Xerotics, never doubted it for a second its been clear we have had a good increase in Visitors etc since the mobile version was launched. i am excited to see everything to come and watch HF grow bigger and better day by day!

Great work guys thank you.