Most of you are aware of what the Warrior Forum is. Many of you started following my posts there long before I launched Income Bully. It’s been thought of by many to be the #1 internet marketing forum online, period. And if you asked me 2 years ago I would have agreed.
Of course, you can tell by the title that I no longer believe that to be the case.
In fact, I think the Warrior Forum will become a ghost town in the next year or two.
Why Warrior Forum Is Dying Out
It’s been a little over a year when Freelancer.com bought Warrior Forum. Was it a good buy? I think it was more likely a good sell by Allen, the previous owner. Maybe he knew things were dying out, or maybe it was certain changes Freelancer made that sparked the “dying out”.
I don’t think it was a premonition the previous owner had… I think it was caused by Freelancer.
First off… let’s talk about why I think that.
The first, and obvious thing that stands out is the rapid reduction of the alexa rank of Warrior Forum. Before the sale of the community, it was sitting between 200-225 pretty regularly. I don’t remember seeing a day that it was out of that range.
I realize Alexa ranking isn’t something to base these claims on by itself. However, using it to monitor the general trend of a website high in popularity is actually something pretty accurate. Perhaps not the bounce rate, pages per session and such but the overall popularity being measured, seems to be pretty legit.
Since Freelancer took over, the Warrior Forum has dipped to 1,229. In 12 months, that’s about a 600% decrease in popularity… actually, if you want to be technical, that’s just a 600% decrease in Alexa rank. Of course, that ranking is still pretty freaking great. Maybe one day I’ll be able to achieve that!
My opinion isn’t just based off of Alexa ranking though, my opinion is based on much more. My own observations of changes being made, the drop in forum traffic, and the drop in general activity.
Since restructuring the forum, adding additional forums, moving old threads to new forums and deleting threads that received good traffic, this really dropped their search engine traffic. Using SEMrush as a basis here, they’ve had a drop of 500% in search related traffic. That’s awful! About a 50% decrease in search related traffic after 1 week of changes. What a disastrous week, that continues to echo into today!
They were moving URLs/pages/threads into new forums or different forums and instead of keeping the same URL they would take on the new sub forum category in its’ place. This not only messed up the overall relevance of existing forums but it resulted in a lot of 404 errors, and they still have forgotten to 301 some very popular posts that received a lot of search traffic. This was a gross oversight by Freelancer.
The moderating staff continues to close or delete threads that have been adding value to the forum, and now its’ littered with a bunch of borderline spam posts, and the same topics being vomited back up every couple months.
My Own Personal Observations About The Warrior Forum
We can use third party tools to analyze things all day but sometimes it doesn’t tell us the whole story, and sometimes it’s not accurate. I realize that, and that’s why I take my own personal observations into consideration.
I’m not here to bash the forum, it’s been good to me, I’ve released two WSO’s, my “Ultimate Blueprint to Start a Web Agency” and my “Ice Cold Email Gold product“. Both have done well, better than they would have done without the existence of the Warrior Forum… but that’s also part of the problem.
People take advantage of the “built in” traffic it provides, and they spam out WSO’s to make some money. The quality is generally low, and they seem to approve any junk that gets submitted.
They have done some good things though… they did a redesign which it did help out the overall look of the forum, but I also know that sometimes better looking doesn’t mean better conversions, behavioral metrics, or better overall results. I think Freelancer felt like they just “had to do something” to become legitimate owners. This was followed by reordering the forum structure, adding new forums, adding large promotional graphics in the main forum index page.
The follow up “work” is likely what has caused a large dip in traffic and activity.
For example, the offline forum which was one of the highest quality and more active forums on WF was originally in the 4th position or so in the main index. It now has been moved towards the bottom and has seen a reduction of 150% in users viewing the forum and a 270% decrease in weekly post volume.
Even the WSO and Main Internet Marketing subforums have seen a large reduction in traffic and post activity, about 200% decrease.
These numbers are huge and can’t be ignored.
I wrote an email to Alaister Low of Freelancer giving suggestions and it seems like they actually took my advice and removed some of the images that increased bounce rate. I don’t think that will be enough though. There are plenty of other issues, but I have the feeling we’re at the point of no return.
Like I said though, this isn’t a personal jab… they’ve done some things pretty well and have made a decent effort. Some of those things include:
- Redesign of the forum
- Adding a Mobile Compatible version
- Tightening up WSO rules like no income reports
- Fixing database errors and uptime problems
- Adding Warrior Payments and Funnels
Mobile compatibility was always a topic but never executed under the previous ownership. Same with the database and uptime problems. WSO’s were like the wild west and a con man corner. Warrior Payments was never on the radar.
Freelancer did a good job, taking an existing property and making it more profitable overall…
The problem is they’ve lost a lot of traffic in the process.
The last attempt was by adding tags to the top of the forums. I assume they’re doing this for search engine purposes which is a bad idea, but I guess it does have some user experience benefits in theory. But… that’s the problem with theory. Theories sound good, they seem to be the right answer, but it’s the data that matters.
The addition of tags at the top of sub forums have caused another drop in activity. This one I only tracked through the SEO forum, offline forum, main internet marketing forum and ad network forum, the post count volume has dipped once again but this time only between 3-6% per forum since implementation.
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How Can Warrior Forum Rebound?
To be honest, I have doubts that they ever will be able to. I think it will be a downward spiral of destruction.
If it were me though, this is what I would do.
- Order the forums based on overall activity. Put the most active forums on top. Ditch the Freelancer discussion and close the WAMA forum.
- Instead of the WAMA feature, do a well promoted once a month event, not forum dependent.
- Give incentives to product creators so they continue paying WSO fees instead of choosing to do a self hosted launch.
- Do a “reactivation campaign” and spend some money on retargeting.
- Make an effort to reduce low quality posts, perhaps adding some sort of gamification system.
- Pay well known bloggers, and authorities to make X amount of posts each month, whether it’s their own posts or commenting on other posts.
- Get rid of the tags… the tagging system already works without having it displayed on the top of the forum. It’s likely reducing the average time on site.
Would these things help? Maybe… maybe not. It’s just what I would do.
One thing is for sure though… the warrior forum can not continue on in its’ current state.
Summary
Very rarely are you able to just “maintain” your position. If you’re not making progress, then you’re falling behind. It’s a constant push and I don’t think they’re pushing enough.
There’s something wrong… I know it, the users know it, and they know it.
What are your thoughts? Is WF going to die? Survive? Thrive? Would love to hear your comments below.
I think somewhere in the decline is a more hidden factor. I cant put an exact finger on it, but the site as a whole ( Warrior Forum ) does not have the page ranking ability it once had. almost as if it got a Google Slap somewhere along the way.
I can recall not to long ago if I was out searching for any specific “Internet Marketing” related topic, WF would have a presence in most search top 10’s. That is simply not the case today. One wonders if the sub header section that incudes a better than brief description of the section along with the Tags is in fact an effort to correct again that underlying unseen issue.
Today if you search ” forum” WF ranks well. Its when you start to get more specific that things turn south fast in the SERP department. And again you have to wonder why…
The bigger and better question is what are the alternatives? Yes, there are other marketing forums… but none that I would regular. So if WF is declining, where is the lost traffic going to? That’s usually how the world works right? One looses and another gains? who is gaining? I know I can pinpoint it.. but the gainer considering a 600% loss at this point SHOULD be obvious no?
Keep in mind there’s been thousands of well ranked, and well linked pages that are now broken, or moved with a new URL structure without a 301 redirect. That could explain a big reduction of PR flow. I forgot about the “summary” they’re providing now, which I think is a pretty big joke lol.
As for who the gainer is… I’m not sure, I see splinter cells popping up but as a forum they don’t have the potential to even take 1% of the loss into a gain. Other forums that were big competitors haven’t really gained either. I think when you look at overall gains you have to consider other sites that are ranking for what threads and certain posts were ranking for, doesn’t have to be a forum. My guess is the gainers, are all the people that were ranking #1 on page 2, now being on page one. LOL.
Either way, they know something is wrong. So do we.
but over a period of time doesn’t the effect of no 301’s get corrected in the sense that Google sees 404’s and drops the page out of the index, and then through the process and time of indexing the site ( I think this is what the tag links are supposed to be doing ) would not the newly located pages develop ranking and list? – that’s simply not happening – at all.
I have in the past worked on sites that were such a mess I literally went into Google and de-indexed the whole thing.. let it clear for a month, and brought the whole thing back to be indexed and included… to far greater success than what is seen with WF. That’s why I say there is something amiss there.. but what? is the question.
The summaries if you really look at them.. I think they are very well crafted SERP description fillers. There have what 30 some topics? and not a one of those pages has a “set” description tag… it is that summary that is filling that in. They might better serve themselves to create the same type of content in the tag pages that they are now displaying as a dynamic search listing.
Paul, I think the problem related to 301 redirects is the fact that it is going exactly as you say… they see the 404s and drop the page, right? Well the problem is that those 404s have a bunch of links to them, they were linked within the forum and outside the forum, quite often. People are probably mining for treasure using the broken backlink strategy. LOL.
Just reindexing the site or posts, with a different URL structure won’t bring back rankings when it was ranking due to the backlinks it acquired along with the internal linking.
Make sense? I don’t believe that’s the only reason…. but I think it’s a legitimate contributor.
What about server location?
As for the descriptions… I really believe the descriptions and tags are hurting the post volume. They could set the meta tag inside vbulletin, and move the tags to the bottom if they want. I would bet if they did a split test, they would see better metrics, but that’s all speculative and will remain speculative since we don’t get to call the shots.
Hi,
Thoughtful and good post.
I have kept away because there are too few quality experts posting real advice – lots of newbies telling each other what to do.
But I didn’t realize how badly they had ruined the search engine rankings – that is just crazy and easily fixed for a big organization.
Dale.
The blind leading the blind, is what it is now.
It is crazy about the search rankings, I would have thought they’d tread lightly with any changes, and if the outcome wasn’t ideal, revert.
Thanks for the comment Dale.
I’ve been seeing a decline as well. I’ve been a long time lurker I think I only have 3 posts in 7 years of lurking haha. I don’t even go there anymore.
Not sure what they can do to make long time visitors, members and lurkers want to come back.
It’s still a good place you just have to sift through all the junk to get to the good stuff.
Yeah I hear you, but “good” is definitely subjective. How many people are willing to continue going through a pile of elephant crap to find one gold flake? How can they get rid of the junk?
Do you recommend any other communities that are active and are of quality?
I totally agree with the fact that Warriorforum is declining. I also hate the hard moderation that they are putting into it (I tried in the last months to create 3 really good thread on the offline marketing section but they all got removed).
I’m sorry for them but I think it will die soon as a marketing community.
I’ve had a few very valuable threads that were also deleted. Never understood why they do that when it follows the rules.
You have managed to articulate a feeling I have had about the WF ever since the changeover of ownership – even the quality of the newbies has declined with exactly the same questions being posted each week. The movement of the free WSO’s had an impact, as this was one of the rookie strategies a lot of IM’ers began their businesses with. It seems only the older threads from before the change are worthwhile finding. I actually think a lot of the traffic has shifted to Facebook, there are a lot of IM-related pages on there, and Reddit. Blackhatworld is no alternative!
I’ve never got into Reddit but have been reconsidering lately. I’ve heard from a lot of people and now you about the facebook groups for marketers. Seems like a good idea to get involved. Google+ communities have been pretty good but you have to dig for the good ones otherwise it’s just a spamfest 10x worse than WF!
aside from the restructuring of the WF, I feel what is really happening is that IM is a dying art if you want to call it that and people are tired of fighting google only to get slapped once again… I used to spend countless hours tweeking all my websites only to find my hard work on page 10 and all that for pennies, anyway I could go on but I think you get the idea … other IM forums have also drastically dropped in rankings … IM is dead so you guys need to find a new niche … this is coming from a ex-moderator of a well known IM forum not mentioned in the post
Thanks for the comment and I appreciate your insight. I don’t think the industry is dying at all, it’s expanding. Internet Marketing isn’t a niche, it’s an industry, SEO is its’ own industry now. There’s other forums that have picked up from WF’s decline, like webmaster sun, even BHW has picked up.
I don’t think you’re wrong about people getting tired of fighting Google, but that doesn’t cause an industry to die. Maybe with all the FB groups popping up, it’s hard to compete with the split media. To me, it seems like Freelancer is making ALL of the wrong moves.
Thanks for the input Znort!
So where is the happening place these days, when it comes to internet marketing?
I am a long time member of the warriorforum and I agree with your analogies the place has seen a huge drop in traffic since Allen sold it.
The traffic is getting even worse since the writing of this blog post I remember when the main internet marketing forum used to have over 5000 people in there at any given time now they are lucky to get 2,000
It’s still a good forum and I hope one day it will bounce back to its heyday heights but I think it is a trend that unfortunately will continue.
Great write up btw a lot of good pointers and suggestions.
Thanks for the comment Jay. It’s really unfortunate, I haven’t even visited WF in months now. Seems every time I go it gets worse. With the introduction of the feed, it has taken away a bit of the forum vibe, which will likely cost more return visitors and community contributions.
I had 2 threads offering my writing services in the Warriors for Hire section back in 2011 and 2012. Just short, simple ads. They got tons of inquiries and I made a significant sum of money.
I posted 2 this year (same service) and never made my investment back. I think I had 3 inquiries, 2 asking for review copies and 0 orders.
Warrior Forum is dying. Good thing I’ve established myself at BHW.