Cafe Announcements 📣 Search phrase suggestions please for Cafe SEO

[MikeMorrell]

Both. If we don't get new members, or more posting from existing members the site will not last long.

Income from advertising is minimal - currently about £11 per month. Cafe Site cost is hard to say as most costs cover both sites. I would think the cafe alone is about £1500 a year

Subs are probably about £2000 vs about £150 from ads. Subs may be an issue this year due to Paypal problems, I may need to ask all subscribers who are on the old Paypal system to re-subscribe and of course we may lose some subscribers.

We have lost a few good members over the last couple of years.

Just a thought. There are many members (including me!) who would really hate to see the cafe get into financial difficulties and 'not last long". The minimum membership subscription at the moment (which I have had for years) is £20 a year. But I could afford an 'Annual subscription PLUS' membership priced at £50 a year (or optionally more).

I've just upgraded my account to a PLUS' membership. It's not a long-term solution but if more members who value their membership of the cafe - and can afford it - were to 'upgrade' their membership, then perhaps that might help to provide a short-term 'financial bridge' towards increasing the membership and posting on the cafe.

Mike

 

[MikeMorrell]

FWIW, I just asked question on Google AI: "what is the average annual membership fee for on-line forums"

The answer: "The average annual membership fee for an online community or forum typically ranges between $300 and $600 per year. While many traditional forums remain free to access, paid premium communities generally charge a subscription equivalent to $25 to $50 per month".

This amount is (thankfully) way, way above the cafe's current membership fees.

I also came across this article in the UK 'Guardian' Newspaper.

I humbly submit that an annual membership of the 'cafe 'is worth a lot more to sax players than the various '£20 or under' products listed by the Guardian.

So maybe it's time to adjust the cafe's membership fees?

 

[mizmar]

We have lost a few good members over the last couple of years.

I'm sure this came up a while ago.
Clearly it's hard to find specific things that improve retention or joining rates; people being diverse 'n' all. And that active participants are exactly not the audience for asking, in general, why people become inactive!

 

[Pete Thomas]

Clearly it's hard to find specific things that improve retention or joining rates

And that active participants are exactly not the audience for asking, in general, why people become inactive!

Generally based on correspondence I get people are noticing that the overall tone of the forum is becoming less friendly. I’ve also noticed this. More and more I see people are calling out others in threads (instead of just reporting) which leads to snarky comments and can put off existing or new members.

But we also have to bear in mind that we have an oldish demographic so decline is inevitable unless we find a way to compete with such as Reddit or tik tok, which is unlikely.

 

[mizmar]

I dropped off most social media platforms; but I'd bet you'd be hard pushed to find any, or comments section, that's got more pleasant over the last years!

 

[Pete Thomas]

I dropped off most social media platforms; but I'd bet you'd be hard pushed to find any, or comments section, that's got more pleasant over the last years!

True but that is where we should be different.

 

[Pete Thomas]

Is your goal to be the top hit or the most relevant hit?

Top hit for many of the terms is not practical nor is it expected in many cases. The purpose of my question here is more about finding any practical cases that i can realistically work on.

The point I see is to make sure I am giving it my best shot in an age where traditional sites and forums are in danger of extinction.

We have always relied on traditional SEO which more or less has meant Google for years but this is now becoming obsolete. For example where people used to do a website search on a search engine, very often they now just search on Reddit or TikTok for an answer. The fact that (I am sure) they would get better answers here or various other sites doesn’t seem to matter.

 

[MikeMorrell]

Top hit for many of the terms is not practical nor is it expected in many cases. The purpose of my question here is more about finding any practical cases that i can realistically work on.

The point I see is to make sure I am giving it my best shot in an age where traditional sites and forums are in danger of extinction.

We have always relied on traditional SEO which more or less has meant Google for years but this is now becoming obsolete. For example where people used to do a website search on a search engine, very often they now just search on Reddit or TikTok for an answer. The fact that (I am sure) they would get better answers here or various other sites doesn’t seem to matter.

At least the cafe shows up favourably in this Google AI search.

 

[MikeMorrell]

Another useful Google AI search is "what are the top 20 questions people ask Google about playing saxophones?"

Intro to list of top 20 questions: "When people go to Google to look up how to play the saxophone, their searches generally fall into three major buckets: getting started, mastering the mechanics, and fixing frustrating sound issues. [1, 2, 3]*. Here are the top 20 most frequently asked questions about playing the saxophone, categorized by theme:

Themes:
Getting Started & Choosing a Horn (mike - 7 questions)
Embouchure & Tone Production (mike - 5 questions)
Gear & Maintenance (mike - 5 questions)
Intermediate & Advanced Techniques (mike - 3 questions)

Google AI References: Reddit (just 1 single question!), saxschoolonline FAQ's, TTS 🙂

I was curious about why 'Reddit' shows up so often in answers to Google (AI) questions. So I asked Google AI "Why does Reddit show up so often in Google search results?". The answer was illuminating.
- Yes, Google 'updated its ranking algorithms to prioritize authentic, human-generated (helpful) discussion forums over AI-written filler and SEO-optimized blogs'.
- the answer also mentions that Google has multi-million dollar data agreement with Reddit. Giving Google a direct, real-time firehose to index Reddit threads the moment they are published
- oh, and that Google uses Reddit’s data to train its large language models (LLMs) and natural language systems, which in turn power features like Google's AI

 

[Pete Thomas]

- the answer also mentions that Google has multi-million dollar data agreement with Reddit. Giving Google a direct, real-time firehose to index Reddit threads the moment they are published so it is

This has been the case for a couple of years at least. And of course Google owns Youtube, hence it's not a surprise Reddit and YT show in preference to traditional websites. That has been the case for years and to be expected. SEO for for any UGC (user generated content) sites like ours has always been difficult as we have little control over content, but various Google algorithm changes also hit us hard. e.g. pages with "thin content" were penalised. Thin content is content that is short (e.g. a thread with a single post that has very few replies) or a thread that has a lot of off topic stuff.

So what you might ask, there are plenty of pages (threads) with more content. But enter Google crawl budget. This means Google has a limit on the amount of pages on your site that it will crawl and index, so you then have to make sure your good pages go into that budget by making the "thin" pages ignore by the Google bot. This is difficult to either do manually or to automated on a forum where each thread is a page.

But it is one reason we merge sometimes threads or remove off topic discussion.

 

[MikeMorrell]

This has been the case for a couple of years at least. And of course Google owns Youtube, hence it's not a surprise Reddit and YT show in preference to traditional websites. That has been the case for years and to be expected. SEO for for any UGC (user generated content) sites like ours has always been difficult as we have little control over content, but various Google algorithm changes also hit us hard. e.g. pages with "thin content" were penalised. Thin content is content that is short (e.g. a thread with a single post that has very few replies) or a thread that has a lot of off topic stuff.

So what you might ask, there are plenty of pages (threads) with more content. But enter Google crawl budget. This means Google has a limit on the amount of pages on your site that it will crawl and index, so you then have to make sure your good pages go into that budget by making the "thin" pages ignore by the Google bot. This is difficult to either do manually or to automated on a forum where each thread is a page.

But it is one reason we merge sometimes threads or remove off topic discussion.

As always, I bow to your superior knowledge of all things related to forums and SEO, @Pete Thomas. I mean this honestly and sincerely. Yes, Google search results are (for obvious reasons) heavily biased towards YouTube and Reddit. So IHMO the cafe cant hope to çompete with YouTube or Reddit just in terms of 'volume of visitors' or even 'authority'. But strangely enough, the cafe does show up as the second-listed 'sax forum' on one of my previous posts

Again, you're way ahead of me on all things related to forums and SEO. But despite Google's heavy bias towards YouTube and Reddit, Google's change in algorithm does IMHO also present an opportunity for the cafe. The more I read about the changes in Google's search algorithm, the more I'm convinced that it priorities 'multiple authentic user responses' to authentic user questions'.

So I come back to a couple a suggestions I made in previous posts in this thread:
- explain - in 1 page- who the cafe sax forum is for and what content (and benefits) both visitors and members can find here
- Reformulate (where possible) the 'forum section titles' as questions. For example: "Questions about gear, playing, repair and impro", What are your favourite music recordings or video's? Do you want to buy, sell or swap saxophones?
- Reformulate (where appropriate!) thread titles into questions. Just as a few recent example:

- "could any Link tenor STM owner give me a side to side barrel measurement of this mouthpiece?" (instead of 'Tenor Link Question'​

- Can anyone recommend a good Flight Case? (instead of 'Flight Case Recommendation')​

​

I have absolutely no idea whether - and if so - how these subtle changes into 'Questions and Answers might affect the Google SEO for better or for worse.

You coud try it out, just as an experiment, say for a year or so. If the changes make no difference to SEO, then we can always go back to the 'current status'.​

 

[Pete Thomas]

- explain - in 1 page- who the cafe sax forum is for and what content (and benefits) both visitors and members can find here

The about section used to have a lot more of that kind of thing, but I changed it to work better as a modern portal. Less prose (that ver few people actually read) more feeds. But I’m happy to try some more words, maybe our ai policy.

Reformulate (where possible) the 'forum section titles' as questions. For example: "Questions about gear, playing, repair and impro", What are your favourite music recordings or video's? Do you want to buy, sell or swap saxophones?

What would the advantage be in changing the titles to questions? I think people will post (or not) regardless if the titles being questions. I’ve purposely made the titles the way they are, and I wonder would people actually post more with the your favourite recordings being changed to what are your favorite recordings?

I’m not so sure.

 

[MikeMorrell]

The about section used to have a lot more of that kind of thing, but I changed it to work better as a modern portal. Less prose (that ver few people actually read) more feeds. But I’m happy to try some more words, maybe our ai policy.


What would the advantage be in changing the titles to questions? I think people will post (or not) regardless if the titles being questions. I’ve purposely made the titles the way they are, and I wonder would people actually post more with the your favourite recordings being changed to what are your favorite recordings?

I’m not so sure.

TBH, me neither, Pete.

FWIW, someone on a 'photo restoration forum' recently advised me that the best way to find out how best to use the current plethora of Photoshop 'AI' options/models for the very limited use I wanted to make in 'old photo restoration' was to ask the 'AI models' themselves.

I've applied this principle in asking 'Google AI' how to improve the SEO of forums, in particular saxophone forums.

At the top of the answer, the summary was: "The best way to improve Google SEO on a forum is to maximize your crawl budget by blocking low-value pages and leveraging user-generated content structured with Q&A schema. Because forums naturally create thousands of thin, repetitive, or administrative URLs, search engines can easily get bogged down. Controlling technical indexation while optimizing structural elements allows your community's authentic discussions to rank highly".

There are other tips, but the phrase "user-generated content structured with Q&A schema" stood out for me. Google have a multi-million business relationship with Reddit. The current 'Google AI was 'trained' based on Reddit. Google also owns YouTube. So Google is (IMHO) heavily biased towards these 2 'resources' as sources of information for any answers to user queries. As far as forums go, Google considers (IMHO) 'Reddit' the gold standard (on which it has been trained!).

Out of curiosity, I very quickly (2 minutes) browsed through Reddit/r/Saxophone. My very impressions were that - like the cafe - people asked for information via a non-question-formulated title. But the number of 'question-formulated titles' was probably far higher than the cafe. I should quickly add that the Reddit sax forum has around 28K visitors and 1,2K contributions per year. So the cafe is IMHO highly unlikely to be able to compete with Reddit in terms of 'volume'.

IMHO what distinguishes the cafe from other from other forums (like Reddit/r/Saxophone) is that at the cafe, you become part of a 'community'. Whereas - from what I've very quicky seen on Reddit/r/Saxophone - members have more of a 'transactional' relationship with each other. In the sense that if someone asks a question, many (or very few) other members can chime in with their 'answers' or 'opinions'. In 'Google' terms, Reddit/r/Saxophone is IMHO more of a Q&A forum than a 'community forum' as the cafe is.

Another big difference between Reddit andthe cafe is that on Reddit, members can can 'vote up or down' the relevance or value of replies to a question. So Reddit users can immediately see which 'reply' has been been voted 'top of the list' to their question. I am not suggesting that the cafe takes a similar approach!

But for better or for worse, Google's current search algorithm is tailored to highlight forums that 'authentically' provide value to 'authentic' visitor and user questions that are "structured with Q&A schema".

That was the only basis for my suggestion that '"Q&A" format section- and thread titles might score more highly in Google's SEO ranking.

One more thought. In any additional 'Intro Page', perhaps it would be worth emphasizing that the cafe is first and foremost an international "community" of sax players who support each other long-term.

Mike

 

[Pete Thomas]

but the phrase "user-generated content structured with Q&A schema" stood out for me

Yes and we use Q & A schema,

Another big difference between Reddit andthe cafe is that on Reddit, members can can 'vote up or down' the relevance or value of replies to a question.

Oh yes they can on the Cafe.

But it is up to the user of the user generated content to ask a question, e.g. here is a structured quest schema in action:

Playing the saxophone - Ghosting or ghosted notes

Does an 'X' instead of a note-head mean a ghost/grace note? I thought a smaller sized note with a slash before another note was a ghost note. I read somewhere X can mean staccato or tenuto or a ghost. I thought staccato and tenuto are indicated with a dot or dash? I not talking about a...

cafesaxophone.com

When creating a thread you choose the question tab. Then users can vote on answers and selct the answer which is the solution. This follows structured data protocol.

The problem can be that it only works for questions that have a specific correct answer, and most questions here are asking for opinions which do not fit into Q & A (or rather FAQ) schema.