[okfn-discuss] Terrible Search results for "open license"

Fri May 20 09:02:09 UTC 2011

Just a thought: if you find the correct Wikipedia page with a very similar
or related name and if everyone clicks on it about 5-10 times in a google
search on several distinct occasions, it should bring the article towards
the top of the google search where natural interest and the high level of
trust the algorithm places on Wikipedia will keep it there in the top 1-4
hits. I did this with the article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keenan_Cahill and
several others because I have noticed how much crap is on the internet
related to the topics, it is in the best interest of everyone to have a
mildly accurate Wikipedia article at the beginning (where the OKFN could
appropriately use one of it's relevant publications to create an appropriate
and accurate reference. I may be recommending SEO techniques, but remember
when using Wikipedia as an SEO tool, you need to make sure that you stick to
the communities' rules as well.). As it is right now OKFN is overwhelmingly
represented on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content which is
the redirect for Open license, but it doesn't show up on my google
searches.

Alex Stinson
User:Sadads

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Jason Kitcat <jason.kitcat at okfn.org> wrote:

> Dear Tim
>
> On 20 May 2011, at 08:26, Tim McNamara wrote:
> > OKFN is not very friendly to itself when it comes to SEO.
> >
> > Most of our big projects live on their own domains. Even our smaller
> projects are on subdomains. From what I understand, these are considered as
> separate sites by search engines.
> >
> > The upshot is that the organisation's web presences do not support each
> other. Therefore, each one ends up fighting for ranking.
>
> This is true. In my previous job SEO was one of my main daily concerns and
> keeping everything under one domain does help the page ranking in the search
> algorithms (assuming it's a popular and well regarded domain in the
> linkosphere). But OKFN is a distributed and complex place so not easily
> resolved.
>
> The Apache Foundation, on whom we loosely model ourselves organisationally,
> have dealt with this to an extent via subdomains. Which is probably the best
> compromise between SEO and project independence once can aim for.
>
> e.g.
> http://httpd.apache.org
> http://directory.apache.org
> etc
>
> > The situation may actually be worse than that. I remember hearing that
> Google has begun to frown upon syndicated content. This is to counteract
> spammers adding duplicate content on trending topics. If have copy on a
> wiki, then duplicate that copy to another area, we may actually be harming
> ourselves.
>
> It is true that duplicate content is a problem which can get your pages
> demoted in search engines. I don't think OKFN are guilty of duplicating much
> content and it is fixable by using the metatag link rel="canonical"
>
> Ultimately because the words Open and Knowledge are rather generic it is
> always going to be challenging achieving SEO supremacy for OKFN - but there
> is still lots we can do!
>
> All the best,
> Jason
> --
> Jason Kitcat
> Foundation Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
>
> +44 (0) 7956 886 508
>
> http://www.okfn.org
> http://twitter.com/jasonkitcat
>
>
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>
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