Basic Review
Site Name:Webmasters rule
Site Type:Site promotion
Age: 3 months + according to whois
Appearance
The appearance is pleasing, but not inspiring, the forum icons look like stock items with no real customisation, the blue and grey/silver tones work well together, I would have preferred a little more colour, and some better shading to add depth, especially to the banner. I'm not too keen on the style of font, I personally would have preferred a more formal font to give an indication of professionalism to the site, I also cannot work out the relevance of the car to the forum, I can only assume it's an ego trip on the admins part !. You are obviously using some king of adware to help pay costs, the top advert I was faced with was eastern European cyrillic script, so I couldn't understand it anyway.
Layout
The layout is typical for a promotion forum, and it reeks of a direct copy of FP, with a few tweaks to descriptions and forum names, it would have been better if some original idea's had been incorporated. There are a lot of promotion forums out there, and to succeed you need to be different, copying the competition is not a route to success.
I'm finding the index page layout a little narrow, especially with the sidebar, I have a 15" screen and would prefer to see more of it used, than trying to cram so much in the middle of the screen.
Statistics and Activity
19k in posts over three months is a fantastic figure, it amounts to around 200 posts a day, which points to a busy forum, yet when I visited the forum, on three occasions there was no-one online, 200 posts is a lot of traffic, and with 518 members registered, I would have expected more activity than I saw.
I have to admit that I am a little sceptical of these stats, I get the impression there has been a database merge, especially when you consider your actual presence on the net (see below)
Content
2500 + topics is good for a forum of this age, and the subject matters are well subscribed to, but again I see nothing different to the 100 or so other promotion forums out there, my impression is that you are being used for a backlink or two and little else, as is the case for most in this genre.
Organisation and SEO
For a promotion forum your own SEO is poor, a quick check reveals :
Google Pagerank for: webmastersrule.com 1/10
Pagerank is valid!
Alexa Rank for
http://www.webmastersrule.com - 387,693
DMOZ.org listed? - not listed.
Google Directory listed? - yes
Yahoo! Directory listed? - not listed
Domain age? - 3 months 3 days (According to Whois created on 24.03.2012).
Domain history? - yes
With the amount of traffic your stats say you have the PR is low, I would have expected at least a 2 and possibly a 3 with that amount of traffic.
You've listed with Google, but not DMOZ or Yahoo, two of the three most important directories on the net, relying solely on google is a downfall.
When Googling "Promotion Forums" you don't figure on the first four pages, with your claimed content and traffic you should, something is wrong.
Words from the Reviewer
I feel the forum is in limbo, you've had a fantastic start if the stats are to be believed, but now things are slowing down, like many Admin you've concentrated on the front end, and not looked after the back end, you need to promote yourself even more, directory listings are a must, without these and continued traffic a great looking forum is next to useless.
I'm giving you two stars, because as a promotion forum, your own promotion should be top of your agenda, and you've failed to apply yourself to it.
Star Rating
2.
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