State of the Refuge

It has been suggested that I post a regular “State of the Refuge” post. This thing will most certainly evolve as time goes on and I get more feedback of what people would like to read but for right now it will include new members, any interesting milestones, particular threads of interest or blog posts that have created a stir… any significant rankings gained and anything on the horizon for the site…. So, without putting it off any further, here we go…

Well, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend, I know I did. But, as with all good things, they must come to an end. I got back to work today and was greeted with server problems for the site. When all was said and done, we were down for about two hours, but we’re back up and running now and are continuing to look into a dedicated server for this site. On the bright side, we now have our sever logs working thanks to the restart so that should provide us some useful information.

Despite the problems we had today, the past week has been a great one for SEOrefugee.com! We started the blog that I am currently posting to, and got it integrated into the forums so that it automatically starts a thread when a post is made. We also gained eleven new members! We saw the arrival of some familiar faces (Scottfish, WilliamC, okguyjames) as well as some new faces (mbongwe, azoomba, Imbae.net and others). We’d like to welcome all the new members and once again invite you to post in the welcome section (if you haven’t already) to let us get to know you.

Things to watch for in the coming week… we’ve got a couple of great articles coming up. We’ve got RMC interviewing the people’s mod, Wit, about Wiki among other things. I also will be updating my previous blog entry about the regularity of content, giving the results to the third and final test. That is certain to spark some discussion as I am not sure that many people agree with me on that one. I’ll also pull an RMC and tease you with a little something… we are going to be launching a regular feature on our site that you wont be able to find anywhere else on the web. Now, I’m not sure if it will be this next week, or at the start of the new year but it will be well worth the wait, I promise you that.

As for rankings, we are currently stuck firmly in Google’s litter… I mean sandbox. We are doing well in terms of links and I’d like to thank everyone who’s linked to us. However, there is always more work to be done and if you’d like to help us out, a link to the site is probably the easiest way to do it. Yahoo has also been hesitant so far (as to be expected) but MSN seems to like us as we have been gaining decent spots (top 20) for terms such as “seo forum” among others.

Well, I think that’s all I have for you this week. As I said, this section will be constantly changing so if you liked part of what you saw, or wanted to see something a little different, be sure to let us know and we will do our best to give you exactly the content you want.