I've tried many times to find this forum via google, also told a friend about it and he couldn't find it either. I've tried googling citrusgrowers, or citrus growers, or citrus growers forum, I even tried Joe Real. Nothing works.

Very strange, this is a stealth forum.

jc

This is a free forum, so google bots don't find it too easy. I am looking into another type of forum & website the will not have these problems. It's just down to the money I have to invest & the return....

I will help with the money. - Millet

I have tried to google this site for friends. I found if I used this-
citrus growers forum "joe real" it came up on the second page. I also tried just Joe Real and was astonished at how many sites he posts on. We are so lucky to have him.

Helix

Todd and Bob,

I think we should write to Raulken, the maker of the software, on the need to improve indexing by Google, it will be for his own benefit.

Joe

I agree Joe.

I like this forum and it's ease of use...you can read every message in a thread without having to click once(unless you go to page 2). The lack of goggleness was just a peculiarity I was curious about. Laaz, I hope you don't change the forum. Perhaps goggle just need to be made aware of the problem.

Branching out with the expectation of being popular with the online Search engines comes with another type of price that the forum format host administrator may not want - and that is Spam. If you do not mind deleting the Spammers posts wanting to sell Don't click, this is spam, knock off watches and cheap computer hardware and later perhaps banish the online entrepreneurs as being members in this forum, then it may not be in your or our best interest to go full bore and make every post in this forum a retrievable "hit" with what is left of the olden day "we aren't doing this solely for the payola" progressive, online Search engines.

I am not so sure anyone in this forum is deserving of rock star status and have a public mass following with their knowledge of Citrus. I have not seen it from this end.

If you guys are serious in expanding the horizons of this forum then I suggest you get some people from various Universities and get them in here posting. The dilemma for them is that newbies and upstarts will try to tell them they are wrong or will question them without doing any background research on the subject, much like some of you saw in another forum format host, which in a way prompted the notion of having this forum. I had it happen to me also from that same forum. I've seen someone that I feel is one of the leading nurserymen in Conifers get raked over the coals by sophomoric kids just trying to make an instant fame name for themselves and be popular with their braindead brethren but at what cost when the person that has been around these plants, lived and breathed them for many years, had contacts with specialized people allover the world that are growing those plants, feels ostracized and rejected for trying to help people that already want others to think they have all of the answers, yet have not even begun to know what they are talking about yet and not even know enough yet through experience to be dangerous to those that are far and away beyond them in their scope of knowledge.

The refreshing thing about this forum is the prevalent lack of attitude of the members as opposed to another forum format host dealing with Citrus. If you want to develop an attitude that you want others to be a part of at the expense of limiting others from coming in and telling what they know then by all means proceed and become popular while much of the information many of you may want to know or learn more about may not ever be told to you. There are some people holding back in this forum already as it is and all I can do is speak for myself why that is. Rule number one that we abide by here at Snickles is never try to fool the person that has grown the plant. You do not score any points when you do try to hoodwink others or hone in with ill conceived BS just to be popular.

Jim (mr.shep)

Well said Jim. Thanks for the post.

Laaz, you guys have done enough just with this forum. I'd hate to see any of you have to devote a 24 hour day just to fight off the Spammers and the people that will join the forum, make a few waves, leave and we never hear from them again. I've seen the latter happen with Maple followers a lot.

There are two other Citrus forums online that are worthwhile to most anyone to join but I think one Citrus forum should stand out from the rest and I believe this forum is it. I will not badmouth the two other forums as one of them I do participate in on occasion. Okay, I'll reveal this now as to why I felt compelled to help out a little in there. I knew that people were growing Citrus indoors in Canada as far back as the mid 80's. Mostly people in the Ontario area but what those people learned to keep their plants alive indoors could be applied to other parts of Canada and parts of the US as well. I've seen Citrus grown in ground in greenhouses and saw them do pretty well for those people that did not want to chance it having their trees outdoors.

At the nursery we had a select form of Mandarin that came in from Japan around 1990 that grew like a weed on its own roots in the greenhouse. We had to prune it a lot (prune it one time every year) just to keep it downsized. It did not matter what we did to that tree it would send out flowers and new growth almost as soon as we pruned it back. The tree does not act so vigorous when grown outdoors however.

I know which search engine seems to be the most popular but I use my old standby - WebCrawler. I used to pick up hits on the old HotBot that I had a hard time finding anywhere else or today may be stashed away on page 10 or so from one of the popular Search engines. I've always found it rather odd sometimes that much of the UC Cooperative Extension and even the UC Riverside Experimental Station links are not found on the first page of a keyword search.

The host for this web site must not want Google to come in and invade them with their bots for a reason. There are pros and cons both ways but to keep things simple whereby we do not have to go stealth just to visit a web site that requires cookies to be enabled just to browse or make a post, then the what you see is what you get software may be the least harmful to the online lookers and posters in this forum. We've had to delete out several posts coming in from Europe whereby people have joined the forum format host for a day, invaded certain threads with their multiple same content posts offering cut rate pricing on I-Pods and I-Phones in a private Maple forum. Our posts are not picked up by the Search engines either but bots do come in and look around the site frequently. It is not the bots I worry about, it is what comes with them which is why some people find it imperative to use Spyware or Malware software to try to protect their hard drives or worse yet server hard drives of such invading critters finding permanent resting spots after they have initiated an attack on our systems.

Leave the forum as is with a family atmosphere and let others come in by way of word of mouth or from their own interest in Citrus and other plants. In time we will see more interest in what Joe is doing with his 80 n 1 tree or hear from Stan and Ned with their trees or Millet with his greenhouse operation or you with the variegated Citrus or buddinman with all of his work through the years with these trees and Malcolm with what he is seeing in Florida or Citrange with his long term interest in Citrus (still blows me away that he was trying to get a plant from Hillier before I even knew of them) or the past history of Citrus growing in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan, China and even Mexico back in the days of the Mayans.

Jim

Google's ranking may have changed since the time of the original post but this site is not that hard to find. It appears as the first result if you google the phrase "citrus growers forum" and third if you google the phrase "citrus forum". The entry (here) in both cases is an indirect reference to this forum which I had posted in another citrus forum. However this site's exposure would be limited if search engine crawlers are unable to access its content.

If you try to log-in as guest, none of the links in the post will be visible or accessible to you. And that is one of the basis of Google's ranking. It reads the link you reference either in your site or in your post. The more you cross-reference, the more also your site will go up the ranks along with those you post as reference. Now the bots, being signed-in as guests, they will never be able to utilize those links that we place along with our posts. I believe this was intentional on the part of the software and server owners of this forum, to discourage the other sites from inflating their ranks by exploiting this forum.