...has a pretty cool name. Eric Nickell is keeping the death watch on our #1 Google fu.
« Quick Notes | Main | 13 Percent »
...has a pretty cool name. Eric Nickell is keeping the death watch on our #1 Google fu.
The comments to this entry are closed.
Every time I read about this show, it makes me wonder if the name will be a good or a bad thing for this blog. If the show fails fast, and this blog thus lasts longer, then I guess it might be a nice bump. Surely some people looking for info about the show will find this blog, and maybe a few will become readers.
If the show is a huge success, then it is kindof a bummer. Not a huge one, but a bummer nonetheless.
It reminds me somewhat of when the tv show "Threshold" came out. I worried that it would totally drown out any possibility of someone finding my company's first game, Threshold RPG (http://wwww.thresholdrpg.com), if the tv show's sites and fan sites overwhelmed it. Fortunately (for me), the show tanked fast and so I didn't really have to worry about it much.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | May 18, 2010 at 04:18
Hi Michael --
I think you're probably more concerned than me.
My prediction: We should get a traffic spike during the early days of publicity and then eventually we'll fall off the map (more or less) on Google, as people start to link to the Fox-related sites.
It's remotely possible that we'll still be on the first page for TN, since we've got some old link-fu, but I think Fox probably does some SEO work for its shows, and if they get serious about that, they can own the first page of results.
Which means, in the worst case scenario, that people who don't do RSS or bookmarks, but use Google as a shortcut to find the blog (that's me half the time!) will need to add something like "terra nova virtual" or "terra nova mmorpg" in order to use Google to find us. That will make us more obscure.
But we've never been about gathering high traffic anyway. We had some chances to "go mainstream" and we passed them by, and I think we're at about 1/2 the pagehits we were at in the 2004-2006 days, before you had sites like Massively and Kotaku doing a regular beat on MMOs. And our posting frequency is down a bit, as Ted observed over a year ago.
I think the reason for that is that most of us, after almost 7 years of discussions, are either moving on to new territory, having conversations in other forums, or have reached a consensus on the old topics. At the same time, the blog is still plugging along... and will be for a long time, I imagine. So that's good.
Really, the thing that concerns me about this TV show not that we'll be harder to find or that we'll lose traffic. It's that someone unfamiliar with the blog might someday think we named the blog in homage to a Fox TV show. (Especially if the show turns out to be awful!) :-)
Posted by: greglas | May 18, 2010 at 08:22
It's spelled Spielberg.
Posted by: Stabs | May 18, 2010 at 21:21
Whoops! Thanks!
Posted by: greglas | May 18, 2010 at 21:31
Oh wow. Good point. That would be unfortunate. :)
TN was one of the first game design blogs I really got into reading religiously, and from here I branched out. So I do care a good bit about its long term health.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | May 19, 2010 at 00:27
Aloha,
I am seeking open call casting information.... with a number of other VIP locals from Hawaii... any news is good news at this point.. thanks for the blog.
Posted by: Tanya Marie Willis-bourgo | May 24, 2010 at 22:22
Your RSS feed doesn't work with internet explorer.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 25, 2010 at 13:05
I'd suggest putting a call out to see if any of your readers have any SEO moves and perhaps do a little bit of rejigging where necessary. The danger however might not be the sort of thing so much where it disapears off google, but where it starts getting the sort of banalities above where people stumble in thinking its about the show, and getting angry and confused when it isnt.
Posted by: dmx | Jun 06, 2010 at 04:55