This is a new concern, and the staff wanted to share it with everyone, and solicit your help in avoiding the use of abbreviations and acronyms for products discussed on BITOG.
Here is the issue - abbreviations, like M1 for Mobil 1, make sense to the long time members of BITOG, but they do not make sense to Google or others searching for information. In the age of AI answering questions, the use of abbreviations reduces our site relevance and site traffic.
It’s critical work to keeping the site alive and relevant because the day that Google turned on AI summary at the top of their search results, our site traffic dropped by 30%. People are getting Google AI generated answers and not coming to BITOG.
For example, over 1 million searches for “Mobil 1” led to our site. Fewer than 1,000 searches for “M1” led to our site. Searching on the term M1 generally leads to discussions about World War II weaponry.
So, Wayne, and the staff, have started editing abbreviations/acronyms because they are not commonly, or universally, recognized, even among the site members, and they are certainly not recognized by Google or people outside the site who are searching.
We want to drive traffic to the site. We want folks searching about oil to find BITOG - but that will not happen if we use acronyms known only to a few. Acronyms like “V - R - P” or “P - P” or “S - T” (spaces and hyphens added so our daily database work does not change them to their proper names) are hurting the site’s search traffic. Sure, we can still use “FAA” if we are talking about air travel, or “NHRA” if we are talking about drag racing, but please avoid using the product abbreviations that have become so common here.
We, the staff, have been editing posts, in alignment with this effort and the results have been mixed. Bots and “find and replace” have led to some unintended editing consequences. Manually editing is an insurmountable amount of work.
If you have an instance of where an actual word was changed to something erroneous as a result of our editing, we’d like to know about it so that we can fix it.
In the meantime, help us out with the effort - please spell out the entire product name. “Pennzoil Platinum” “Mobil 1” "Quaker State" and the like.
We really appreciate it. It’s important to keep the site viable and searchable by those who have yet to join our ranks.
Here is the issue - abbreviations, like M1 for Mobil 1, make sense to the long time members of BITOG, but they do not make sense to Google or others searching for information. In the age of AI answering questions, the use of abbreviations reduces our site relevance and site traffic.
It’s critical work to keeping the site alive and relevant because the day that Google turned on AI summary at the top of their search results, our site traffic dropped by 30%. People are getting Google AI generated answers and not coming to BITOG.
For example, over 1 million searches for “Mobil 1” led to our site. Fewer than 1,000 searches for “M1” led to our site. Searching on the term M1 generally leads to discussions about World War II weaponry.
So, Wayne, and the staff, have started editing abbreviations/acronyms because they are not commonly, or universally, recognized, even among the site members, and they are certainly not recognized by Google or people outside the site who are searching.
We want to drive traffic to the site. We want folks searching about oil to find BITOG - but that will not happen if we use acronyms known only to a few. Acronyms like “V - R - P” or “P - P” or “S - T” (spaces and hyphens added so our daily database work does not change them to their proper names) are hurting the site’s search traffic. Sure, we can still use “FAA” if we are talking about air travel, or “NHRA” if we are talking about drag racing, but please avoid using the product abbreviations that have become so common here.
We, the staff, have been editing posts, in alignment with this effort and the results have been mixed. Bots and “find and replace” have led to some unintended editing consequences. Manually editing is an insurmountable amount of work.
If you have an instance of where an actual word was changed to something erroneous as a result of our editing, we’d like to know about it so that we can fix it.
In the meantime, help us out with the effort - please spell out the entire product name. “Pennzoil Platinum” “Mobil 1” "Quaker State" and the like.
We really appreciate it. It’s important to keep the site viable and searchable by those who have yet to join our ranks.
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