[CentOS-docs] Improving the PageRank of individual wiki pages

Sat Jan 3 14:38:45 UTC 2009
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>

Hi,

Let me first stress that the success of the wiki is tight to how many 
users find it as a resource. And that users will only find the wiki for 
their problems if it has a higher PageRank.

(I am using PageRank as an example, other search engines would do 
better if we can implement some changes overall.)

If we take the HowTos/Laptops/Wireless page as an example, the page is not 
part of the first 100 hits (using CentOS and Wireless as search keywords).

So what can we do to improve the PageRank ?

  - Use better titles

    The page says "HowTos/Laptops/Wireless - CentOS Wiki", I think it would
    do much better if we could use the (first) page title, which would be:
    "Making Wireless work on your laptop"

    Is it possible to influence the title in MoinMoin ? Can we remove the
    CentOS Wiki part ?

  - Add keywords

    A way to add meta keywords to pages should help as well. Is that
    possible? The keywords should probably have a permanent CentOS in their
    at the end.

    If keywords are absent, it could list all words from the titles as
    (default) keywords

  - Add description

    Adding a meta description can help search engines as well to index the
    page. We could do this for the more important pages. Or use the first
    paragraph by default for all other.

  - Use the wiki URLs more often

    To promote the wiki, we should more often provide solutions from the
    Wiki and then reference them as answer on the mailinglist/forum.

    Instead of answering them on the mailinglist (and never add the info on
    the wiki). If we start doing this collectively, maybe we can spark it
    to others as well.

  - Easier to register

    We have discussed this before, what is the current status ?

What else can we do to get more people to find the Wiki, and increase the 
number of people adding and changing the Wiki ?

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]