Sometimes I am amazed at the kind of support Engloids.Info gets. It continually ranks on Google, gets cited by foreign language wikis, has articles translated and re-blogged by THE Vocaloid Blog. While I'm quite proud of these achievements and thankful to all our editorial staff this popularity is not without its downsides.
Our issues arise from the takedown of the Official English Vocaloid.com back in September. We covered it in "Yamaha Updates Official Vocaloid Site, Snuffs English Version" back when Yamaha revised their website for Vocaloid 3 and took their dated English language site down.
Without an English language site their website fails to rank on English language search engines. When their site fails to rank on English Google my site takes top spot and I end up fielding a variety of technical support questions.
If its something simple I usually try to help, and usually have to stress than Engloids.Info is not in any way associated with either Yamaha, PowerFX, Zero-G or VocaTone. If it is something more technically involved, usually concerning serial keys, I usually try to direct them to the proper place to seek help.
I know my blog is awesome, thats why we rank in Google, but we shouldn't be ranking before official resources. I mean we are a fan-site that is structured to be as 'professional' as possible. Though its a blog I use a custom theme where you wouldn't be able to tell it was Wordpress powered at first glance.
I am not sure if they actually think we are affiliated with the pro-companies or if its out of desperation because they can't find proper English language resources. Judging from the Google search results that direct people to my site I am willing to bet it is the latter.
Recently got an email where a guy gave me his serial key asking me to help him troubleshoot his Vocaloid 2 activation. Looked into my records and found that he found my site by Google-ing "Yamaha Vocaloid Email".
The other search terms where my site was found with yesterday included "how does vocalid.com work", "vocaloid.com english", & "vocaloid english website" and those were just the searches from one day!
Thankfully Yamaha finally got around to working on their English language site again. We covered it a bit in "English Vocaloid Official Returns, Calls You a Dummy" when an enterprising VO user correctly guessed the password to the beta version of the site. While it is still a work in progress, and isn't open to the public, it is a step in the right direction.
Hopefully Yamaha will get their English site up soon because I know their fans are waiting. Till then I will try my best to help who I can, and redirect those to the proper channels to seek help from when I can't.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
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