On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Gordon Mohr (@ Bitzi) wrote:
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.
Mmmmh, I don't feel that's usual Google quality.
`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'.
Maybe it's just a sandbox effect on my site as you suggest. I was suspecting that all links from blogs and wikis tagged with rel=nofollow would have a bad effect on the ranking of these new generation websites (as far as I understand it's a widespread practice which is supposed to avoid Google bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing).
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.
Come on, there are not 60 bioinformatics wikis!
Funny thing: I was about to say "come on, Google is not Altavista". So I discovered that (1) Altavista still exists and (2) my site is ranked #2 on Altavista! Too bad nobody uses Altavista anymore.
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:
Very interesting, thank you. That matches exactly my symptoms.
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.
Sure.
Martin
-- Martin Jambon, PhD http://martin.jambon.free.fr
Visit http://wikiomics.org, the Bioinformatics Howto Wiki