DOWNSIDE AND UPSIDE ON CLOSING YOUR NING NETWORK TO THE PUBLIC

[Troy Marquis]

I recently closed my ning network to the public and i seem to get 20 sign ups a day but my rankings went from 69,000 usa rank to 85,000 and 699,829 global to 713,679 ,so i thought without members the site isn't as valuable than getting ranked with less member,so i decided to close my site to gain the member rather than a rank system which will bounce back when i have enough traffic

[frankie]

I was thinking about doing the same thing but I would assume that you will lose a tremendous amount of links once google crawls your site changes. 

[Troy Marquis]

yea i can care less about google at this point they dont pay me lol i fell inlove with making a network that ppl are enjoying

[Lori]

There ya go!

My site has been closed since day one. Its 3.5 years old.  My membership is 5430.   I have a 15 month old International traffic counter.  There are 2,855,638 hits to my front page in 15 months.

I have people wanting to "help me" make a lot of money thru google analytics and stuff I don;t understand.

I tried all that Google Webmaster stuff in the beginning and it was nothing but headaches!

My site is a labor of love.  The members feel as if its their "second home"  and I could care less about anything else. !  Closed site cuts down on quite a bit of stuff that really matters!