TWCL

[RussSpruce]

I've been wondering about this for a while now, does having a mirror site on SmackJeeves or DrunkDuck help with comic views? Or would it mean that they would just look at your comic on that particular site and not bother seeing it on the main site? Has anyone done this?
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[Zoe Robinson]

Putting up a mirror will kill your Google rank. This in itself will reduce your viewing figures, as fewer people find you. Your ranking is based on people linking to you, and if you have two sites you'll probably halve your links.

Further to that, if your comic is available on Site X, why would people who are already committed to Site X bother coming to your main site? I wouldn't and I'm not unusual in that. I've already got a login on Site X, so I can not only take part in your community there but I can do it without needing to sign in anywhere else.

In short, it's not worth it.
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[Luke]

I have no experience with this, but I'd listen to Zoe. Based on past experience, she definitely knows what she's talking about.
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[cdrcjsn]

While it's true that you want your traffic directed towards one site, I think a mirror site can still help.

If you're still scrabbling to even get 100 unique visitors for example, then a mirror site that has an established community would probably send a significant amount of hits your way (it'll be like putting up a single hyperlink to your site on a page composed of hundreds of links, but it's still better than nothing).

If you want to eventually migrate those people off to your main site, then you can just update a week or two behind on the mirror sites to encourage people to visit your main one.

There's probably even some code you can install that will allow you to put your main comments section on your mirror sites so you have a single community for your comic.
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www.familiar-ground.com

Vote for Familiar Ground!

[smbhax.com]

Zoe Robinson wrote:

Putting up a mirror will kill your Google rank. This in itself will reduce your viewing figures, as fewer people find you. Your ranking is based on people linking to you, and if you have two sites you'll probably halve your links. Further to that, if your comic is available on Site X, why would people who are already committed to Site X bother coming to your main site? I wouldn't and I'm not unusual in that. I've already got a login on Site X, so I can not only take part in your community there but I can do it without needing to sign in anywhere else. In short, it's not worth it.

I've seen you say that bit about PageRank before, but do you have direct experience with that, or are you just repeating what you've read elsewhere? When I went looking to remind myself of just what the heck PageRank is (and I could swear I didn't have to install the Google Toolbar the last time I checked my PageRank...huh), I got an awful lot of links to pages whose summaries sounded like they were preaching various forms of web voodoo.

I don't see anything in a skim of Wikipedia's description of the PageRank algorithm that says a mirror site would seriously impinge upon your main site's PageRank score.

And really, how would somebody know that a mirror site had definitely killed their PageRank?

I've had at least three mirrors of my site up for quite some time now. My main comic site's page rank is 4. Is that bad? Have I crippled myself somehow? Well, I don't know and I guess I don't really care. My main site comes up just fine if you google with fairly obvious keywords, and it comes up ahead of any mirrors, so I'm not particularly seeing how mirroring has hurt there.

What I do know is that the mirror sites send traffic to my main site equivalent to spending maybe $0.25 to $0.50 a day on a generic, 24/7 Project Wonderful ad campaign. Except it's free.

And my various comics now have "subscriber" numbers adding up into the several hundreds in some cases among these mirror sites. Heck, SmackJeeves put my Princess and the Giant comic in their Comic Spotlight section a week or two ago, and it's now shot up to 117 subscribers on that one mirror site alone. That is truly small potatoes compared to the main site, of course, but it seems pretty worth it to me for almost no additional effort, and it's only going to go up with time. I've had another comic featured on another mirror site, and I've had my only podcast come via a mirror site.

Furthermore, because many of the readers on these free hosting sites I use as mirrors are webcomic authors themselves, I've met a lot of cool webcomic authors through those sites, found comics that inspire me, gotten a good idea of how several demographics I don't really get on my main site react to my comic and other comics, and so on. For that type of information gathering, networking, and experience alone, it's been well worth it as far as I'm concerned.

Additionally, it's saved me from feeling the need to put a comment system I would need to manage on my own site; I don't really want to have to deal with tons of comments, but I do get a steady but easily dealt with--and that's partially because you *can* report spam and comment abuse on those sites, so those leaving comments tend to be on their best behavior--amount on the mirror sites. So I'm very happy with how that aspect has worked out.

And the sites have author comments, and I always put in links to neat things that I've just put up on my main site. Once I get a store I'll put a direct link to that on the mirrors. Again, they only get the smallest fraction of what my main site gets in terms of traffic, but it is still people who wouldn't be readers at all otherwise, and it doesn't cost me anything.

I would really be surprised if whatever this PageRank voodoo is supposed to be could counteract all the positives there.
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[cdrcjsn]

I think it will hurt your google rank only in the sense that your total pageviews are spread out among two or more sites rather than a single one.

I think it's a mistake to assume that it would've been possible to get those readers from the mirror sites in the first place without setting up those mirrors, so I personally see no harm to google ranking.

In other words, if you have a main site with 1000 readers, and two mirror sites with 500 each, it doesn't necessarily follow that you would've gotten 2000 readers if you only concentrated on your main site. Most likely you would only have 1000 readers and those 1000 other potential readers on the mirror sites would never have heard of your comic at all.
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www.familiar-ground.com

Vote for Familiar Ground!

[Zoe Robinson]

smbhax.com wrote:

I've seen you say that bit about PageRank before, but do you have direct experience with that, or are you just repeating what you've read elsewhere?

Yes, I do have direct experience of it. My main job is producing articles for various blogs and websites that rely on page views and clicks on adverts in order to make money. If I don't get page views, I don't get ad clicks. If I don't get ad clicks, I don't get paid.

A higher page ranking on Google means a lot more page views (when you get to the first page on Google, it can mean a difference of a few thousand to a few hundred thousand page views compared to lower page ranks). If you want to make money in the job I have, you need to learn Google's page ranking alogrythmn so you can SEO your pages quickly.

I'm glad you are doing well with mirror sites but if I'm brutally honest, my own experience tells me you are in a minority.
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[jaygee]

Zoe Robinson wrote:

smbhax.com wrote: I've seen you say that bit about PageRank before, but do you have direct experience with that, or are you just repeating what you've read elsewhere? Yes, I do have direct experience of it. My main job is producing articles for various blogs and websites that rely on page views and clicks on adverts in order to make money. If I don't get page views, I don't get ad clicks. If I don't get ad clicks, I don't get paid. A higher page ranking on Google means a lot more page views (when you get to the first page on Google, it can mean a difference of a few thousand to a few hundred thousand page views compared to lower page ranks). If you want to make money in the job I have, you need to learn Google's page ranking alogrythmn so you can SEO your pages quickly.

I'd listen to the lady. She knows what she's talking about. My main job involves something similar.
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[cdrcjsn]

Looking into this some more and it does seem that Google does not like duplicated content. Having the exact same content on 5 different sites will hurt your page ranking for all of them.

However, google can't read images. You can just rename the image files (use an automated macro for this) and post them that way.

Post a full month's worth of strips with a link to your main strip.

Make a unique blog post on the mirror sites once a week to show that there's still activity.

The main question I have with page ranking though is does it matter for comics? Most (85%) of my hits from google were looking for my comic specifically, so that means that it doesn't matter if I come up #1 or #9 on their search.

It would totally be different if I was trying to promote a product or have articles that people might want to find. But if all I have is my comic and blog, why does page rank matter?
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www.familiar-ground.com

Vote for Familiar Ground!

[wendyw]

There are people that look for comics with certain content or themes though.

There's also people looking for comics that they can't remember the name of, which might be your comic or might not be. Even if it's not they might stumble on your comic looking for the other and enjoy it.

To be honest I have no idea how effective higher google rankings are for webcomic readership, but I know I have found comics before because I've been looking for particular themes. I'm not sure how typical I am of that though.

Another question is things like TWCL itself.
When I've been looking through the actual list before I've seen duplicate entries for the same comics on different hosts each one sharing the traffic and lowering the position in the site's rankings.

Now, if that is a big enough negative to the additional traffic that you can get via being a member of multiple communites is a question I couldn't answer, but it is a factor in the equation surely?
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Blog

[Metruis]

Speaking for myself, I get far more traffic via blogs, forums, and targetted advertising than google. While a good Google rank might be critical for a business, as a webcomic it's definately more about setting up a network and for that, having mirror sites can really help... there are people who go on DrunkDuck/etc to read comics and mirroring there can attract in attention through front page displays, etc.

Chances are, unless you're a front page search result for webcomic or "genre" webcomic... well, that good google page rank probably won't help you too much but a mirror site might.

Just because you're on the first google page for "comic name" doesn't mean people will actually be googling "comic name". Yeah... if you've managed to get up so that you're showing up on page one when someone googles for fantasy webcomic... it might make a big difference, but for your average joe blow webcomic, a good google rank is PROBABLY not worth the advantage of a mirror site.

That said, I'm on Google's first page for fantasy graphic novel; I'm pretty proud of that one and it does bring me hits... so if you can optimize to be on google's first page for a good keyword, then it might be worth it to not mirror.

However, a DrunkDuck mirror has a different site layout; chances are you won't be duplicating news posts... does Google check for identical images too? Since these general mirror sites have different ways to build your sites, the code will be different and in my experience DrunkDuck at least changes the name of your comic to be some weird number thing anyway.

That said, I don't mirror; it's too much work for me. Mostly because every time I look at my old pages I think 'eww I should fix this' and then burn five hours fixing things. D:<
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[smbhax.com]

Oh gosh SEO people. All right but I think we're talking about different scales, then, and maybe you guys are talking about things other than webcomics. Yes, if your mirror sites are pulling in a significant portion of hits compared to your main site, you've got issues--of which Google's liking for your site is a mere symptom.

But if you're doing the usual stuff to promote your webcomic, the main site should be seeing way more traffic than the mirrors; my three mirror sites put together average about 0.6% of my main site's traffic. They are NOT sucking traffic away from my main site--on the other hand, they are almost certainly contributing to a net gain--small, yes, but still there--in traffic to my main site. All the extras associated with my comic--extra art, articles, etc--are only on my main site; people aren't going to ditch my main site for one of the mirrors unless they weren't really all that interested in sticking around the main site anyway.

Given all of that, are you still going to say they're hurting how much Google likes my main site? Because if you are, you're going to have to be much more specific about how exactly that's supposed to be occurring before I'm anywhere near convinced.

I mean, if we're talking Google hit visibility, there are lots of times that I've googled a comic, and its TWCL entry comes up higher than the comic's actual site does. TWCL comes up higher than two of my three mirror sites. Is TWCL bad for our sites? If not, then why are mirror sites supposed to be bad?

I have seen people close down their mirrors, saying they need people going to their main site so they can make money off selling their ad space. None of those comics were anywhere near the scale it would take to be making a living off their comic anyway, so I've always found that puzzling. I think probably almost all of the people here, myself included, are not at that level, either; I took ads off my site because at this stage, they just aren't worthwhile. I'm not trying to sell ad space, so I don't care if someone finds my comic through the main site--which is much more likely since that's where my ads and TWCL and similar listing sites send them--or via one of my mirrors, because the benefit I get from that reader is pretty much the same, whichever site they're on.

I *have* seen some webcomic sites that are pretty much ghost towns compared to their mirror sites, but as far as I could tell, that's always been because they just aren't putting any other effort into promoting their main site--or they started on the mirror site first, then decided to go for an independent site of their own, hoping to take most of their mirror site readership with them. That seems to be a tough trick to pull off.

There are very, very few sites on DD, Smack Jeeves, etc that have anywhere close to economically-successful-webcomic-level traffic. If your mirrors are pulling in a significant percentage of your comic's overall traffic, you've got real shortcomings in your promotional effort, and you're not going to be successful, Google rank or not.

But if you're putting any real effort at all into promoting your main site, there's just no way in heck that your mirrors are going to be beating it out in Google. So again, is there some kind of other mystery voodoo I'm missing here that somehow makes them bad?
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[SuitCase]

Who on earth discovers webcomics through Google? Who cares about PageRank? The only people that use Google to find webcomics are just readers who forgot the comic's URL.
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Bittersweet Candy Bowl, a comic of love, drama and cats.
Updates 3 times a week!

[Kallisti]

I think we're arguing two entirely different (and somewhat contradictory) points here. It'd be a neat and tidy world if a webcomic that only has 100 regular readers had the same experiences (to scale) as one that has 1000 readers or 10000 readers, but that's not realistic, that's not how the internet (or life, for that matter) works.

For a small comic, either one that is trying to establish itself or is looking for a niche where it will flourish, sites like DrunkDuck, ComicGenesis, SmackJeeves are all good in that they come with pre-installed communities that are already energized towards the idea of reading webcomics. Having a mirror at one of these sites is an excellent way to bring new readers into the fold and to establish yourself as a readable comic. You need a wide general footprint because you need visibility. People aren't going to google something they don't know exists.

Once a comic reaches a certain point, where you've got a core audience with enough gravity that it will draw new readers in without you actively needing to recruit them (individually, anyway), then you can afford to shut down some of the extra distractions and draw people into the core focus - the comic itself. That's the point when the external sites begin to detract instead of attract. That's the point where you want to focus on building a higher page rank, spreading links to a unified point.
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[Casual Notice]

Honestly, I can see three uses for maintaining a mirror.

(1) You don't haave space for an offline mirror on your home system and need a backup.

(2) You started at a community site, and don't want to lose whatever following you got there, but do want to maintain a site with your own url.

(3) You've gained a large following but are too cheap (or poor) to pay for high-bandwidth traffic, so maintain a mirror and a redirect routine in case of high traffic.

Everything else dillutes your stats and results in more work for you.
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What I lack in sincerity, I make up for in sarcasm.
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