Removed Games Show Up to Guests
In the Retro Game Room, any game that has been removed now show up again but to guests only. The removed games will appear at the very end of the search results though. The reason for this is so that search engine bots rank the removed pages high again. When I removed the games that Nintendo had me remove, the traffic didn't take a huge hit right away but instead the traffic gradually dropped including incoming traffic. The incoming traffic took a big drop because those pages were no longer ranking high in search engines since the games weren't showing up in the search pages anymore.

If I can get some of that old traffic back for the games that have been removed, that'll definitely help with site revenue and activity. Even if the games aren't playable for the people who land on those pages, they'll more than likely be able to find other games on the site that they would like. They'll also be provided with a link to http://play.rom.online which has resources that help people play those games.


Default Search Order is Now Popularity
The default search before was "Best" which is basically votes * rating and has been a great way to show some of the best games that the RGR has to offer. The problem is, it shows the same games every day. "Popularity" orders the games based on what has the most plays that day which means it'll show what's trending, make good suggestions to games that are probably interesting and fun but most importantly, it'll show different results all the time throughout the day and every day.

Popularity is also the default search for guests. Hopefully that'll help search engines index games higher that weren't previously indexed very high and possibly even index games that hadn't been indexed.


Overall, these updates should help drive in more traffic and keep the current traffic around. It might take a few weeks or a few months before the search engines start ranking the removed game pages higher again but it should happen and if it doesn't, I'll probably alter things even more for guests.

Good to see you David. Thanks for the update again, and also I do hope you are resting properly? When looking into the rgr it will help in a way for what people need to search for. As in whatever game they will normally play. I'm sure these updates will help a lot as it would always do for people. I tend to go into the rgr sometimes to search for things, so I will be able to tell the difference with this new update here.

This was an awesome idea. I love the fact different games are constantly being presented in the RGR, since it makes finding new titles that are good, or at least popular enough to get a lot of plays, are now easier to find.

I'm amazed at how many different ways you come up with to try and increase traffic and work the search engines in your favor, but I guess that's a necessity when this site has been your livelihood for so long. I'd kill ( not literally ) for the level of business and web experience you have.

I wish you the best in getting back to doing what you love. We miss you already lol.

Now I can be hip to be square and cool like the kewl kids and play all the popular games

As jokingly as that sounds, I do like to get involved in what's popular just so I can understand what everyone's talking about so I usually do take interest in things like these.