Wikiality talk:Admin Board/Archive/Google Ranking

Google rankings, etc.
Do you realize that we are the #4 Google link for "The Greatest President Ever"? Zoinks. --El Payo 04:57, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * That is the funniest thing ever. After actually working to make google ranks here and elsewhere (for example, despite my best efforts to raise Mitch McConnell to this glory, W. continues to rank as Google's favorite "coal whore"), of all the things to achieve accidentally! Wow. high-larious.


 * On another count, the Wikiality.com does well on several of the expected searches (I just noticed tonight that Comedy Central is paying for a Google "wikiality" link!) but I'm wondering about our lack of rank on "Stephen Colbert - you don't get to us till page 3. I'm thinking it might have something to do with our clear preference for linking through Our Glorious Stephen rather than directly to our Stephen Colbert page.  This makes me wonder if perhaps we should flip these pages so the redirect works in the opposite direction, to help the google rankings on Stephen search? I doubt too many people are searching on "Our Glorious Stephen", but I suspect we would continue to do well there even if we flipped it.--thisniss 05:31, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I see us on page 1, result #9. --uno 05:07, 14 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I think you make a great point. I didn't realize that pages were linking through that page. Maybe we should have an edit orgy and undo the self-inflicted damage? --El Payo 05:43, 12 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, I was suggesting the lazier way and saying we could just flip them. Make "Our Glorious Stephen" the wikiality/stephen_colbert page (with a "move page") and make the Stephen Colbert link a redirect - it would be fewer pages to undo!  But one way or another, I do think this has something to do with our google rank (or lack of) on Stephen searches.  There's probably an easier remedy, though, than either one of these.    Oh, maybe "wikiality/stephen_colbert/our_glorious_stephen" - I'm going to try that now!--thisniss 05:52, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * We should definitely not change the Stephen Colbert page to a redirect. The Google works in mysterious ways, but I suspect that they are not reading our internal linkages.  --MC Esteban™ 06:34, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

No, what I did was this: Stephen Colbert/Our Glorious Stephen. I made Our Glorious Stephen redirect to that. The definition needs to be filled out, but I figured we could also collect all our "pet names" there, so that the redirects are sort of "doubly redirecting." The way this page is made now, the url has both "Stephen Colbert" and "Our Glorious Stephen" built in, which is good, I think. I could be wrong, but we'll see. As far as the google reading our internal links, I think it does matter if we're directing around pages - that's why we ranked very high for the first couple of days of the "Greatest Living American" google bomb, but fell as more and more people linked to CN. But hopefully this will fix some of it. I also changed the link in the "hello" template to link directly to the Stephen page - that's probably half of the redirect links right there. Anyway, you are right, it is something of a mystery. And you're also right that we shouldn't redirect Stephen. I was just trying to figure out what to do about the fact that "Stephen Colbert" was 23rd on our "Most linked to" list, while "Our Glorious Stephen" was 4th. (without having to change thousands of links by hand, yipes!).--thisniss 07:42, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I think The Googles possibly weighs in how many times words or a phrase are mentioned on a website, but this is probably not given much weight overall in their algorithm, or else people would just spam whatever search terms they want all over their page. The reason we fell in the rankings for Greatest Living American was because more popular, so-called quality, sites began listing the term.  If they, in turn, got linked to from other sites, then they would be bumped up the list, as that is probably the most important thing when it comes to Google page rankings:


 * "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."


 * "Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."


 * What we really need are a number of seperate pages linking, or "voting", for us with the terms Stephen Colbert. In other words, we need to be more popular.  This is also why a digg page boosts us up a ton, because it is considered a "vote" from a super high-quality site.  Wikipedia would probably help too, if only those wikinazis would let us link here!  --MC Esteban™ 14:36, 12 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, the linking stuff is obviously true, but it matters to some degree how much/whether we're "directly" using the name/term "Stephen Colbert," that's alls I was saying. Not from page 3 to page 1 matters, but matters.  Otherwise, it wouldn't have mattered when we added "Truthiness" to our name, etc.  Popularity and the number of inter-interwebs links clearly makes much more of a difference than this, but I was just saying that this is a piece that we can try to control for in the immediate.


 * Anyway, another important point you raised reminded me of something I've been meaning to ask for a while, which is that we encourage people to use Digg, StumbledUpon, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Technorati (now that we have the Humor Blog), etc. to note what we're doing here. These kinds of linkages carry more and more weight for rankings, but they're also just a good way to get the word out.  I try to "Digg" (et. al.) all our new Featured Articles (though sometimes I forget), and anything that's "newsy" - like the google bomb stuff, etc. Most of the time, these stories don't get "picked up" in a huge way, but occasionally one or two of them have, and it always helps us.  Plus, if I'm not the only one doing it, there's a better chance that someone else will write a "blurb" that catches people's attention. :) If anyone here has any "Digg cred", it would be a huge act of generosity to pick one or two of your favorite pages and Digg them.  (I have no "Digg cred," because the only things I ever digg are wiki related, of course).--thisniss 17:35, 12 May 2007 (UTC)