Martin Jambon wrote:
On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Matt Morgan wrote:
Side note: I'm new to MediaWiki, but I'm having a really hard time googling for help. If I include "MediaWiki" in the search string, the results seem to return every third wiki out there, rather than help about MediaWiki. Any tips there?
I also noticed serious flaws in the Google results when searching for some wikis. Google seems to have problems with the "wiki" keyword:
Shouldn't a search for `mediawiki wiki' (w/o quotes) return: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki ???
It does, in position #12. And the higher results are mostly reasonable, too.
`mediawiki' alone works, so that's fine, but not expected.
Their secret and proprietary ranking algorithms tell Google that people searching for [mediawiki wiki] should get the other results higher, as compared to plain [mediawiki] results. Tweaking the algorithms to do otherwise might help some cases, but hurt elsewhere. They're optimizing with regard to a lot of variables, so local anomalies aren't surprising. And can we be sure their ordering for [mediawiki wiki] isn't optimal for generating the most satisfied users (or most ad revenue)?
Overall, they seem to be doing great ranking wikis and URLs/content with 'wiki' in them. There's no evidence of any 'flaw'.
I personally have a problem with the wiki I am running: `bioinformatics wiki' should return some link to http://wikiomics.org in the top ten Google results, if not first.
How modest! :) You do appear somewhere around 60-70.
And, you are named in the 'snippet' shown for the #1 Google result, a Wikipedia page, perhaps helped by the way you bumped your site to the very top of the list of related links in an edit January 31st.
So I really don't know what I can do, I was used to much better results from Google for my non-wiki pages, without forcing anything. Does anyone have a similar experience? Any fix?
It looks like your site is less than 3 months old. So step #1 would be: just wait. It takes a while -- sometimes 6 months or more -- before Google trusts new sites with a prominent ranking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_Effect
Separate from the sandbox effect: as your site gets deeper content, more organic links from diverse sites (not just backlinks you've pushed out yourself), and longer visits from happy users, you should also expect it to find its "true" higher level.
- Gordon