Google and wikis (was Re: [Mediawiki-l] logo only shows up on some pages)

[Vedant Lath]

hi,

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:

google indexed a java program on my newly created website
vedant.lath.inonly a few days ago, and the program is at #9 in the
search for "sudoku
java". vedant.lath.in was made in november or december of 2005. google
started indexing it only in january.

and my program has only 2 links from other web pages! both are from
setbb.com, a forum for various things.
it is a mystery for me how google's pagerank algorithm works.

vedant

On 2/12/06, Gordon Mohr (@ Bitzi) <gojomo at bitzi.com> 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.
>
> > `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
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