#1 Aug 29, 2014 7:24 AM

Paranoia

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Spyroforum Google results

This is probably a really dumb thing to post a thread about, but whatever. I'm a little curious to know what you computer-savvy people think about this.

I noticed that when you google "spyro forum" on mobile and pc we're always the 4th result after a bunch of darkspyro stuff. But on mobile, the description of the the forum google gives is this: "This forum is for people who like to write Spyro fan fiction stories. (Moderated by Paranoia)" But the result I get on PC is this: " Unanswered. Site Related; Spyro Stuff; General; Games; Extras; Show All ... This forum is for people who like to write Spyro fan fiction stories. (Moderated by ..."

Just wondering why the results show up differently on mobile devices than on PC. Is this just something weird Google does, or is there any way to influence what gets shown? I just find it odd that the fan fiction section would be the part that shows up on Google, since it's not even close to the most viewed or commented on section of the forum.

Stormy

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Re: Spyroforum Google results

I don't fully understand how Google indexes stuff. If I did, I would definitely try to get something more descriptive than that to show up there. Hopefully people aren't passing up the forum because they think it's only about fanfiction.

I would guess since it's looking for the words "spyro" and "forum," it picked out the section of the index page near the description of the fanfiction section because both of those two words show up frequently, or something else about the text makes Google think it's the most relevant. I could probably reword the descriptions of the forums a little bit to get around this, but we'd have to wait for the Googlebots to do their job for anything to change. As for why the text shows up differently on mobile, maybe the mobile site has less space to show descriptions, so it had to cut the text down a little.

Sheep

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Re: Spyroforum Google results

Maybe google recognizes it as a forum, and therefore analytically searches for the text that most likely describes it?
A sentence starting with "This forum is for people who like..." immediately looks like the most probable description.

36IStillLikeSpyro36

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Re: Spyroforum Google results

where exactly is the sentence "This forum is for people who like to write Spyro fan fiction stories" on this site? it shows up on Google, but not anywhere on the forum itself that i can find.

is there a separate area of the site's code for text like that?

Stormy

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Re: Spyroforum Google results

It used to be the description of the fanfiction section. I just changed it and a couple others hoping it will pick up the description from Spyro Chat instead.