College Open Days?

[Guest]

Hi all,

Does the site advertise in any other way apart from the internet? Maybe it would be a good idea to have posters for college open days, if people would be willing to take them to their local collages?

Just a thought.

Kind Regards,
Jack.

[CharlieDelta]

It's been considered, but most colleges are reluctant to let us in for various reasons, which is fair enough. They don't want to be seen promoting a site where things might not always be 100% positive, which is a pity but their prerogative. Only option really is word of mouth and on the web. Our Google presence is pretty well established by now, and I'm trying my best to get us up the rankings. Facebook is difficult because you have to rely on people liking your page.

I think the site is reasonably well known to current cadets, the difficulty is attracting potential cadets who might not think to Google! And then, when people get here, encouraging them to post.

[alistairuk]

You'll probably find most people will have a search on google either after they have been accepted or while applying - even back in the days before I started myself and a bunch of others discovered a certain other site before starting college and new each other from that when we turned up on the first day (some of us even met up before starting college) - so it's safe to say that pretty much anyone starting the cadet ship will at least have done a quick search in google (and found at least something about the career - even if not this site) - if not then they're probably not going to last :-p

[CharlieDelta]

Google sends us a huge amount of visitors, about half at last count with the rest coming either directly (typing the URL in the address bar) or from sites linking to us. Most of the common "new cadet" searches return us on the first page, though there's been problems recently as Google still had links to the old forum in the index. Of course, vBulletin uses a completely different URL structure to phpBB, so people were being sent to a 404 page. I've recently replaced the standard 404 page with a note explaining why the link wasn't working, but to head to the main page and use the forum search as the content they searched for will still be there. I'm hoping this will improve matters!

Annoyingly, the old URLs have been gone for a few months now and Google have daily sitemap updates from us and are forever crawling the site, but the links are being replaced with the new ones very slowly which is a bit frustrating!

[Lewis]

a certain other site

Why so vague you worried we'll all jump ship :P

[CharlieDelta]

The site in question has been dead (in spirit, if not physically) for a long time, accelerated by our schizophrenic antipodean friend.