RecoveryAudio.org is not affiliated in any form with the Alcoholics Anonymous organization.
RecoveryAudio was built with this end goal in mind: to draw in as many search engine visitors as possible and provide them an opportunity to listen to a message that supports their sobriety, and the greater purpose as stated in the AA Big Book on page 45 : “to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself, which will solve your problem.”
In order to support the end goal and draw in as many listeners as possible, the site may have arguable flaws in conflict with AA Traditions such as:
- “Best AA Speakers” Page;
- “Best AA Speaker Tapes” Page;
- The “ratings system” in general;
- Others yet unknown.
I understand these concerns regarding rating one person or one message over another. However, the keywords “Best AA Speakers” and “Best AA Speaker Tapes” are two of the most popular keyword search terms, and creating pages to attract those listeners was essential to fulfilling the site’s end goal.
The ratings system has been critical to those pages as well as many more pages in terms of SEO and supports site’s end goal as well.
As someone with a very fairly solid grasp of SEO and Web Analytics, to disable those pages and the ratings systems would be a major shock to the search engines (search engines are attracted to “best” keywords and individual pages with significant user ratings), would decrease the relevancy and authority of the site in the eyes of the search engines, and would result in a massive drop in the site’s rankings, traffic, and donations, and potentially make the site financially unfeasible to continue. These actions are not supportive of the site’s end goal, and as such, cannot be considered at this point.
I appreciate your understanding in this matter, and am open to discussion of other issues via the Contact page.
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