A new home for GBAtemp News, and how you can help us stay relevant
24 years of forum threads later, GBAtemp News has finally got a home of its own. Faster, cleaner, Google-friendly and the discussion remains. Here's why we did it.
Over the past few weeks we have been working behind the scenes and making some adjustments to how News works on GBAtemp. You may have noticed some changes recently, so here's the scoop!
For as long as GBAtemp has existed as a forum, our front-page news articles have always been regular forum threads - because of course, GBAtemp is built in forum software, we're a community first and foremost after all. So while the news articles may have looked like regular news pages from a visual standpoint; as far as Google and other crawlers are concerned - they were not legitimate news articles at all. To a search crawler such as Google, every story we published was simply another forum discussion, sitting alongside millions of others and that meant they didn't qualify for, or show, in the places where news actually gets seen.
In an age when traditional forums like ours are becoming ever less relevant this put us at a real disadvantage when our news could be doing so much more for us.
So now, News now has a home of its own on GBAtemp - at https://gbatemp.net/news/
All of our news will live here; with a super optimized page wrapper that loads in a fraction of the time a regular GBAtemp page can without the usual forum bloat. We've also redesigned our article format, with short snippets and a streamlined look built for reading.
By default, most links to our news will open in the above /news/ variant page. But of course, we're not abandoning our forum roots, every news article will still exist as its own forum thread and discussion will continue just as it has for the past 24 years. You can hop straight into the discussion (forum version) of the news/thread by clicking the "Read all comments" in the news page - or if you prefer you can toggle a setting in your User Preferences to always bypass the optimized news edition and always go straight to the full discussion thread (there's even a banner at the top of News pages for logged in members!).
Why we did it
Search has changed a lot. Big outlets and aggregators increasingly dominate the results and independent sites like ours have to work harder than ever to be seen, even when we break the story first or cover news that other outlets won't touch (the perks of being independent!). Google treats news articles differently from forum posts and until now a lot of our reporting looked like just another random forum thread to Google and others. So we weren't getting the reach or coverage that we could have been getting. Our decision to give news a dedicated, properly structured home, with clear authorship, means our stories can be recognised for what they are and appear in more places - more readers means more visitors and more visitors means we can stay relevant for longer.
Please consider adding GBAtemp to your preferred Google sources
If you'd like to help, first and foremost by just being a regular visitor to GBAtemp you're already helping and appreciated but if you'd like to do more and would like GBAtemp News to show up more often in your various feeds please consider adding us a preferred source:
Just click the Google 'Add to Preferred Sources' button above (next to the comments and share buttons) - or go to google.com/preferences/source and search for GBAtemp.
It takes a few seconds, it's free, and it genuinely helps an independent site like ours stay visible in search.
Don't want to see that button? Again you can hide it in your User Preferences.
TL;DR
- GBAtemp News has changed - now at https://gbatemp.net/news/
- Why? News were forum threads before - now they're real news in the eyes of Google and others
- So what? We were missing possible coverage and user reach - this will hopefully change that
- Me no liek change! Ignore /news/ and tick the 'Open news articles as forum threads' setting in your User Preferences
- Temp look different!? Yes some changes have been made - if you have concerns please share them here
If you'd like to support us you can consider becoming a patron or by making a one-off donation - details can be found here. ... It's our 24th birthday next week after all!
Cheers
- The GBAtemp team
