My AALBC.com Facebook Fan Page is Dead

[Troy]

I've been trying to open my Facebook Fan page, after not using it for about four month, and it appears Facebook has put me into the corner for misbehaving 

 

I actually can't open my page.  It just Just as a sanity check, before I start talking even more trash about them, can any of you open the page: https://www.facebook.com/aalbcfanpage ?

 

Lemme know.

[Mel Hopkins]

@Troy It's there and I even  put a like on it! 

[Troy]

HUmm, maybe it is just my access then.  I would have loved to been able to demonstrate a broken Facebook page  

[Mel Hopkins]

1 minute ago, Troy said:

 I would have loved to been able to demonstrate a broken Facebook page  

It's still broken to you, the page administrator so there's still a lesson for us all!

[Troy]

If would have been more powerful if I could prove it by demonstrating it...If it is still broken after the holiday I'll make a video so that people can at least see it.

[Elva D. Green]

Troy, when I sign in to your fanpage on Facebook I see this pinned to the top: I'm signing off social media for good. If you would like to reach me my email address is troy@aalbc.com (from March) Then I see more posts you have made in July. In my Facebook page I only typed in aalbcfanpage (as opposed to the link you shared when askig for feedback) and your site was first on the popup list. Hopefully I will remember that I sent this message to you and I will remember how to get back to see if you replied. I seem to have a problem with finding the threads I was in.

[Troy]

Hi @Elva D. Green sorry for the confusion.  I actually have stopped using my AALBC.com Facebook fan page.  

 

I do however post to my Facebook page from AALBC.com to share links to content on this site, but I don't sign onto the fanpage and engage there. Which is why you still see posts. I guess I'll pull the page down at some point.  But I am in the process of moving photos I've posted on Facebook to AALBC.com which will take some time.

 

In the meantime, I've edited that pinned post  clarifying how I use AALBC.com's fanpage--which again is just to post links from AALBC.com

 

At the end of the day, I'd like people to engage with AALBC's content on AALBC and not Facebook.  The challenge i getting people to actually do that. 

 

You can find your content on AALBC.com's discussion forums here: https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/9284-elva-d-green/content/

 

[Elva D. Green]

Thanks, Troy.

[NubianFellow]

This is odd. I tried to write a recommendation on your facebook page but I wasn't allowed. I also liked the page through some of my other facebook pages as well. Nevertheless, Black media sites need to be more visible all around the board.

[Troy]

Thanks for trying to support my facebook page @NubianFellow. I stopped people from posting on my wall years ago because people just abused it.

 

I'm against facebook on so many levels. 

 

You sharing your knowledge here us much more valuable anyway.

 

How did you discover the website?

 

Ill add your site to my list of black owned sites 

https://aalbc.com/top_black_websites/top_black_sites_list.php

[NubianFellow]

@Troy I appreciate that brother. And I know exactly what you mean. Our people are addicted to these white social networking platforms that gives people who don't like us the ability to read our minds. I only use Facebook at the moment because of it's ability to send results. But I am also anti Facebook myself. I discovered this site through Google. I will be pleased once we get our people to stop depending on these "mainstream" social networks. They don't like us and for the most part, it doesn't seem like they want us there in the first place other than to study the behavior. I only post links on Facebook myself. That's all they are good for. I don't even chat with family through Facebook anymore because Facebook knows too much already! Thanks once again family! I can also add links about this site to my websites as well.

[NubianFellow]

@Troy I created a fan page for this forum on Nubian Planet which is doing pretty good on there https://www.nubianplanet.com/aalbcforum. Some people have gotten confused but the sites are totally different in every way. In fact, I'm not just disappointed at what Black Planet has become, but I'm actually insulted. They were once the largest Black social network on the planet. Now they look like a WordPress site. (Who spends a reported 30 million dollars on a website to use a crappy looking WordPress theme on it? And yet do not advertise the site? I have my speculations of why that happened and how big MySpace and Facebook have gotten when BP was once the largest social network in the world.) And they are white owned which seems like more of a joke being played on us. 

 

Also, not too long ago I included this site in a review on https://blackpeoplemoveforward.com/black-media/review-of-top-5-most-impressive-black-media-websites/. It says five sites but one had to be deleted so there are only four sites being reviewed for now.

[Troy]

Hey @NubianFellow I created a profile on Nubian Planet https://www.nubianplanet.com/aalbc and have added it to the list of Black owned websites. 

 

I also added the other sites you referenced in your article.  Thanks for covering AALBC.com!  There was a period before the rise of Facebook and Twitter when the site's forum was far more active.  In fact, there were many more active Black owned forums back then.

 

The URL you have for Melanated people is incorrect the correct URL is https://www.melanatedpeople.net/ 

 

I could not add dotafro.com.  It looks like their login is dependent upon Google+, and I was unable to create an account . Perhaps Google shutting down Google+ is the reason.

 

I also noticed that something really bad has hurt Nubian Planet's organic search traffic, starting about two years ago.  I've seen this many times before times and it is one reason the Net is dominated by the likes of Facebook.  If you know the people running the site it is worth addressing -- like yesterday.

[NubianFellow]

@Troy I appreciate it brother. This is something that has really been an issue but I was unable to find what the problem was.I will look into that right away! I will also correct the url's. Thanks for pointing that out brother.

[NubianFellow]

@Troy Big problem with your website. Whenever I try to share an article on Facebook, your default pic shows up without the option to select pics from within the actual post. Same is true on my social network as well. That's a huge problem. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but on social media it's worth a million.

 

Since we last spoke about it, NP has been rebuilt and shouldn't have lost any link juice (all links worth anything were properly reconfigured and redirected). It still performs well on other search engines but Google did a major update at around the time the website was hit and I have noticed a trend that has seemed to target primarily black websites in my opinion. Though I can't prove it, Google has restricted certain sites from gaining traffic by their algorithm. Since this is a change in their algorithm based on many determining factors, it would be impossible to accuse them of being racist though I know they are. I believe these changes have intentionally crippled specific targeted websites from doing well on their platform and I am not convinced that all of these actions are due to an algorithm but also human interference.

 

Even this site which has a high authority rating on MOZ should be performing better than it is. Though Facebook has also crippled content like ours from performing, the content performs very well on facebook based more on behavior than algorithms. But they are slowly tweaking that. My page got nearly 100k likes in just a few days, that was about 2 years ago. Since that time, there has been no growth as far as likes which is not normal at all. But the follows have somewhat increased. None of my other Facebook pages have exhibited this behavior and I even have a page with no content on it that gets likes daily. But on my biggest page, even if articles get read over a million times and go viral, no increase in likes? Not even a hundred new likes out of a million views? The viewers like the content but not the page? I don't buy it.

[Troy]

On 3/15/2019 at 4:22 AM, NubianFellow said:

share an article on Facebook, your default pic shows up without the option to select pics from within the actual post

 

Yeah that is a problem with this discussion forum software (which i did not write). But the problem becomes what photo do you use? Many post (like this one) have not pictures and it you pulled a picture from earlier in the conversation. It might not be related to the post. I'm not sure how using the default image can be improved. If i did I'd suggest it as an improvement.

 

The AALBC site proper with book and author info, which I wrote and makes up the vast majority of the site and its traffic, uses social sharing images that I chose.

 

On 3/15/2019 at 4:22 AM, NubianFellow said:

 

Even this site which has a high authority rating on MOZ should be performing better than it is. 

 

I agree and written about this extensively. That fact is Google, with their bookstore in their search results and Amazon has all but killed all the indie booksites.

 

On 3/15/2019 at 4:22 AM, NubianFellow said:

My page got nearly 100k likes in just a few days, that was about 2 years ago. Since that time, there has been no growth as far as likes which is not normal at all. But the follows have somewhat increased. None of my other Facebook pages have exhibited this behavior and I even have a page with no content on it that gets likes daily.

 

Facebook is rife with fake activity. I can buy a hundred thusand likes for a few bucks. Empty pages with no activity get likes because entities who sell likes also like pages for free to avoid detection in selling likes.

 

Facebook has also said brands have to pay to reach an audience -- organic reach is dead.

 

For these and personal reasons, I don't use Facebook.

[NubianFellow]

2 hours ago, Troy said:

Facebook is rife with fake activity. I can buy a hundred thusand likes for a few bucks. Empty pages with no activity get likes because entities who sell likes also like pages for free to avoid detection in selling likes.

Yes. That makes sense. I can easily spot pages that have a low organic reach but tons of likes. You can tell by the activity on those pages. If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of likes on a page but hardly any interaction, comments or shares, they are most likely purchased. On my facebook page I get more activity than some pages that have 5 times my likes. But they can't compete on shares in which they usually get very few. Unfortunately, people are addicted to the facebook platform. They have more users than any other social network on the planet. I believe their days are limited but for now they are relevant.

 

I do believe that facebook has somehow interfered with how pages perform on their platform. But facebook can be manipulated to work in your favor, just like any algorithm. Facebook has tons of stories on various news sites that has implied that they are racist which would be a big ranking factor. Google is another problem. In fact, I don't believe that Google is completely algorithmic. They have an algorithm but they also have an entire building with tens of thousands of human beings who can manipulate that algorithm anytime they please. Google has us trying to play a game they will no longer let us win. I believe the only way they will improve their algorithm is when we get tired of their b.s. and use something that's actually better than google - like duckduckgo.com which sends a considerable amount of traffic to me. Last month they sent me more traffic than google, yahoo, bing and aol combined. These guys just came out of nowhere. They are now my default search engine.

 

I am not crazy about Facebook but I cannot deny that Facebook is powerful.

 

2 hours ago, Troy said:

That fact is Google, with their bookstore in their search results and Amazon has all but killed all the indie booksites.

It's simply not fair and for this reason I have pretty stopped using seo techniques to conform to google. I believe seo is a waste of time these days. I know I am not going to compete against these larger multi billion dollar sites and I used to get plenty of activity through google pics but now Pinterest killed that.

 

2 hours ago, Troy said:

But the problem becomes what photo do you use?

I use a default pic on my site as well, but there is a rule to only use the default pic when there is no picture featured in the post. Facebook does have an open graph debugger that you can use that will let you correct image sharing problems. Most social networks use the same features to pull pics from articles so this effects all sites. Featured pictures are necessary to do well on facebook or most content sharing platforms. I think you just need to change the rule in your og properties. What I have noticed is that even if you removed default pic for facebook og properties, when there are no pictures available, facebook will automatically fetch the default pic or pull a pic from your site. If the pic is not the default pic you wish, you can always go on the back end of your site and change whatever picture they do fetch when a pic is not available from your ftp.

 

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

 

It wasn't a problem last year because facebook would allow you to upload a replacement pic of your liking. They still allow you to upload additional pics but I think it might be a bug that doesn't allow you to replace the default pic.

 

This is the current default pic for this website as shared it on my own platform: