[CentOS-docs] Improving the website and forums

Mon Jan 5 21:16:51 UTC 2009
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

Dag Wieers wrote:
> Something that is not helping us with Google is the prefix "www.centos.org - "
> to every page of the website (including the forums).

Its good to see people taking some initiative on the seo side of things, 
however most of whats in this thread seems to be oriented towards much 
smaller sites, and does not apply to us in a large number of cases.

google has hand ( yes, manually ) setup site specific preferences for 
centos.org - to the extent that we have 2 google bot's on the web server 
24/7. In some cases, forum posts show up on google's cache within 8 - 12 
minutes of the posts being made on the website. posts to centos-announce 
will also make it into google's cache in a matter of minutes.

JohnS: there is no such thing as www.wiki.centos.org - so I am not sure 
what you are talking about.

Also, google does not care much about meta tags, some of the other 
engines do - so they are still good to have ( google isnt quite 100% of 
the internet search traffic yet! ). But google-foo in the title of a 
page is about 4 to 8% of the 'potency' rating of a page. Fewer the words 
in that list, the more the potency per word. Somewhere between 15 to 20% 
of the 'potency' score comes from what keywords other sites use ( 
specially those that have fewer than 20 url's pointing back at 
.centos.org ) to link to that specific page. Placement of words within 
the title, for titles less than 8 words, has very little keyword by 
keyword diff. eg 'baking bread' and 'bread baking' have about the same 
relevance for each word. However 'bunch of wise old men sitting around 
doing nothing but baking bread' and 'bread baking by a bunch of wise old 
men sitting around doing nothing' will have different scores and 
therefore usage for the words 'baking' and 'bread'.

Forum moderators would be able to provide more feedback here : how 
relevant and accurate are most topic's for threads ? If they are 
bang-on, perhaps it might be a good idea to replace the entire title of 
the page with just the title of the post, drop everything else. <opinion 
- subject to discussion>.

btw, SEO is all opinion and experience and very little real fact and 
reverse engineered ;D

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq