800Notes

The crappy 'notsafe' type websites are crowding the searches, blocking access (and probably reports) to valuable sites like 800notes - how do we counter that? This site is infinitely better than that crap!

How are "the crappy not safe type websites" blocking access to 800notes? All you have to do is come directly here by typing in 800notes.com

What he wants to say, when searching, all other crappy sites are first on the page, yes, that's the truth, you have to look for 800notes, if you don't know what you are looking for...tough luck, you may never find 800notes...it used to be different...but I am not sure that somebody is blocking access to 800notes, not going to try.

Yeah, I don't think anyone is blocking access to this site & am not even sure how they could do that.
Why anyone who knows about this site would bother searching when all they have to do is come here directly is beyond me.

Search engines list sites according to relevance, popularity and things in your Browsing history to give you results for the keyword or phrase you input.

Typing in a phone number will give more sites and possibly the one it belongs to, so most people try a search engine. Regulars that prefer this site know to just come here and search. Not everyone wants to know all the details of the callers, just if they can find who the number belongs to.

If a number here on 800notes doesn't have a lot of entries or hasn't had many searches, it does not display at the top of the results list. If everyone just came here and used the internal search, the popularity drops in the search engines because people aren't using them and they don't get in their statistics. 800notes uses Google Analytics, so it helps with relevance to help it get to the top of a search.
One of the main reasons people go around to blogs,  message boards, review sites and comment pages  to spam links and keywords, is to help raise the probability of whatever they are spamming to be listed towards the top of a search.
Many scamming sites do because they are making money and can get others to spam for them. There are also other methods to help such as Meta Tags, done by the web master, but over using combinations of those methods can back fire if they are detected as "spamming" the search engines and get blacklisted. It is possible to "block" a site from being displayed in a search, its just not easy to do.

Learn something new every day. Thanks, Mike.

It appears to me that another dirty trick of a lot of competing sites is they have "optimized" for search engine hits, such that if it's a phone number that they DON'T have any info for, they still have a page/s for it. The goal being to appear in search engines and suck you to their site even though they don't have what you're looking for.
Thanks, weasels.

Most people tend to use Google search, and if it’s done in Chrome Google will use your Chrome history to “tailor” results for you that favors their paying partners.

The phrases one uses for searches also will be used to filter results. Searching for “phone number lookup” vs “who called me” vs “phone number search” all provide different results and 800Notes seldom appears toward the top of results.

800Notes appears as #7 in the search results using DuckDuckGo, if the search terms are “who calls me”. 800Notes appears on page 2 of a like search on Bing and on page 5 of a Yahoo search.

Simply searching by phone number (like the currently trending 202-810-9578) will produce various results these days. 800Notes used to come up more toward the top of such searches, especially if there were trending numbers reported here as telescammers. But since 800Notes decided to discontinue the display of posted numbers without being signed in, most spiders/crawlers/bots can no longer gather any 800Notes intel to feed their search engine databases. Perhaps this has something to do with the lower listing on search engine results these days?

No one has mentioned the problem of sites that steal the copyrighted material from this site and post it as their own.  Copyrights are something that need to be enforced or else you lose them.

Quote:

But since 800Notes decided to discontinue the display of posted numbers without being signed in, most spiders/crawlers/bots can no longer gather any 800Notes intel to feed their search engine databases.

I disagree with that, since the spider bots are given a code on pages instructing them on which pages to crawl and which pages to ignore. The HomePage is just one page they crawl, among hundreds of thousands. Spider bots only scrape a small amount of data per page and the relevance of the page's data is what is calculated in for a search result. The homepage is most likely not scraped beyond the introductory paragraph and meta tags.

Quote:

Perhaps this has something to do with the lower listing on search engine results these days?

The most probable reason for the search engine results to have "shifted"  is mainly due to smart phone's  app development using more search engines and browsers. App development has exploded and the big marketing companies who freely make development kits available to App developers allow them to flood phone users with such a variety of apps to choose from. Competition for traffic is fierce!
This allows the search engine traffic to get diluted away from the major search engines and have less traffic, since more people are using their phones and less of a computer's search engine. Web site developers need to include the "Media" protocols to allow phones to view their sites these days and not everyone is on board yet, also causing search traffic to disperse to sites that are optimized for it.

Heres wikipedia lists of the popular ones for each, just to give you an idea of how many there are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Mobile_browsers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

That is one of the methods scamming sites compete for traffic from a much more successful site. I would recommend to anyone here who finds a site that is displaying information taken from here, to alert the Admin via the Contact Us link , so they are aware and can block that site's bot scrapers.

That could also be a good reason the recent lists aren't available without permissions, as its a prime target for site scrapers to gather data as it is posted. You can program a bot scraper on what information it gathers and to ignore the htaccess file that gives bots permission/denies access. More eyes to inform the Admin can help stop them.

Thank you for the additional details about what may be going on that can have an effect on website popularity. Trends in underlying technologies are not always visible to, or understood by, most users, myself included.

If I read the Alexa site statistics for 800Notes properly, it seems 800Notes rankings have fallen about 1/3 lower since the first of 2018:
 https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/800notes.com

Hopefully the Admins can leverage some of the Octonet and related technologies to deter the loss in visitor traffic.

An "800Notes App" would definitely help by funneling traffic directly to 800notes.com, by-passing the competition in search results. It won't help raise search engine statistics, but the underlying goal is getting traffic and search engines are just a method to get traffic.

I would like to see these forums have searchable content.  There are many, many forums and I find it cumbersome to search through all of them to see if a particular topic has already been started.  Thanks.

Did you try a simple search right from the main page?  I have had that work, but not all the time.  You can do advanced google search, that sometimes works quite well, but again, not always.  Do you have any examples of a typical search you might do?, maybe there are people here who and help.