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

[Sy Ali]

On 5/9/06, Martin Jambon <martin_jambon at emailuser.net> wrote:
> Sorry if this comes a bit off-topic, but it is an important followup of a
> thread 3 months ago.
>
> For the record: 3 months ago I was complaining about the bad google
> ranking of my wiki site (http://wikiomics.org) when looking for "good"
> keywords (`bioinformatics wiki').
> Today (hopefully it will last), it is the first time I see it appear in
> the top 10 results (ranked 2nd after [[wikipedia:bioinformatics]] in
> both Google search and Yahoo! search).
>
> So I was not completely wrong in my expectations, and the concept of
> "sandbox effect" seems to apply. It took approximately 6 months since the
> opening of the site to get honorable Google results (see the date of one
> announcement I made at that time:
> http://www-iphicles.rcsb.org/pdb/lists/pdb-l/200511/003012.html)

As an FYI (since the thread-resurrection was a reply to my post), I
did managed to get google sitemaps to work (by disabling rewriting for
a moment).

However, Google is still extraordinarily bad at ranking me.  This is
most likely because I'm no longer directly associated by being a
subdomain of another wildly successful site.  =/

Also, Google seems to take several years to forget about the previous
domain.  Heh.

Being linked-to by well-ranked sites is still the way to go. 
MediaWiki is pretty awful at getting noticed by Google all on its own,
probably because of mw's repeat use of certain phrases and links on
every page.

I'm also gritting my teeth at how awful its search results are.  It
claims to be crawling me regularly.. and yet somehow I doubt this.. I
have very old caches still listed by Google.

Meh.