Posted by finelinebob on January 27, 2006, at 1:52:07
In reply to blocking ONLY search-engines » Dr. Bob, posted by pseudoname on January 8, 2006, at 10:46:28
Joining this discussion way way late and too impatient to read thru the many posts, so let me make assumptions.
I assume people want to raise the visibility of Babble in search engines. There also seems to be some "tension" (in the pulling sense, not the nervous sense) between be protective of vets and being open to newbies.
There **are** technical means of addressing some of these points.
1) Dr. Bob -- do you use a robots.txt file and/or robots meta tags? You can employ both of these techniques to indicate to good search engine spiders (like Google's) that certain pages should be indexed, certain pages should not have their linked pages indexed, certain pages should never be indexed. You can use the robots.txt file to indicate directories on your server that should or should not be traversed.
2) Reducing the pages indexed can increase the value of pages that do get indexed. Having actual discussions cataloged by Google **may** be of value to certain people at certain times, but you already provide your own means of accessing archives, both through search and through browsing. Add that to the report by many that they "lurk" here for a while before getting really involved and what becomes clearer is just how important the Babble home page is and how important the home pages of the different forums are. The subjects of messages appearing on those top-level pages is probably enough to get keywords like medication names associated with this site. The discussions behind the subjects may add very little value to the hit placement of Babble in Google.
3) Conducting a poll or survey of the search terms that people use to find sites like Babble is one of the most important things that can be done to raise Babble's relevance for search engines. The most typical, common, popular terms that fit with the mission of the site need to appear in as many different types of places -- meta tags, page titles, opening paragraphs, header tags, etc. -- as possible to raise the URL's connection to those terms.
4) Then there is the "miserable failure" effect. If you haven't tried it, go do it right now. Go to Google, type in "miserable failure", then click the I'm Feeling Lucky button. The words "miserable" and "failure" appear nowhere in the page you will arrive at. The reason you end up there, however, is because one author of a popular blog asked his readers to link that URL to the words "miserable failure" on their own web sites. As a result, Google's search mechanism has tied those two words to that particular page as the strongest possible match for those search terms.
This could be the best way to raise the visibility of Babble. If you link here on your own blog or on other sites in comments or whatever, making "Psycho-Babble" or "Dr. Bob" the words tied to the URL will only strengthen the link between those specific terms and the URL of the home page. If people want to look for "depression medication help" or something like that, then we need to make our links to Babble from other web sites clicky on those particular words. What would be the best words to use? The words that the survey suggested above would discover. Then, asking anyone who links to this site to use a common phrase or sentence will use the "miserable failure" effect to create a wonderful success.
Hope I've touched on what all y'all have been talking about. If not, nevermind me. Sorry about the treatise ... but as you may have guessed this is what I do for a living.
be well,
bobDang, Dr. B, you've been busy while I've been gone....
poster:finelinebob
thread:593798
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20060111/msgs/603317.html