Hi, Something that is not helping us with Google is the prefix "www.centos.org - " to every page of the website (including the forums). It is annoying in the sense that it pushes the important keywords to the end of the title and sometimes out of view of regular users (yes, Google search resuls are trimmed). As an example, seaching for "wireless site:www.centos.org" results in titles that are missing all the important items: www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Wireless ... 14.7. Establishing a Wireless Connection www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Intel ... www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Hardware Support - Hawking ... www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Intel ... www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - CentOS 5 ... Hardware and Network Protection www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - try to ... Creating a Wireless Connection www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Hardware Support - Intel ... This is awful, how would anyone find which of those forum articles matches what they're looking for ? My advise: - Get rid of the "www.centos.org -" prefix for all pages - Get rid of the "Forums -" prefix for the forums - Get rid of the "Networking Support" prefix for the forums - Move the "CentOS 5 -" to the end of the title (or get rid of it too) Not sure if it is possible from any configuration, else we should hack the responsible code to make it disappear. Can we put this on a TODO list ? Thanks, -- -- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 6:45 AM, Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:> > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Wireless ... > 14.7. Establishing a Wireless Connection > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Intel ...> My advise: > > - Get rid of the "www.centos.org -" prefix for all pagesNot sure how to achieve this, but if possible just change to "CentOS"> - Get rid of the "Forums -" prefix for the forumsWithout this, how would you be able to tell this is a Forum post? The first two items may be combined into "CentOS Forums" ?> - Get rid of the "Networking Support" prefix for the forumsWe can shorten to "Networking" but cannot get rid of the whole thing. This is defined as the Forum Topics. We cannot remove it entirely.> - Move the "CentOS 5 -" to the end of the title (or get rid of it too)There is a history to this. Without the "CentOS 5" etc, management of the CentOS Forums was very difficult and time-consuming (for us moderators). So, this was added after discussion with Fabian and Johnny. Again we can shorten it to "C5" for example. Akemi
Dear Dag> Something that is not helping us with Google is the prefix "www.centos.org - " > to every page of the website (including the forums). > > It is annoying in the sense that it pushes the important keywords to the > end of the title and sometimes out of view of regular users (yes, Google > search resuls are trimmed).I think the page title should of course start with CentOS.org or CentOS to make cleat that this site is related to the distribution. I agree that www.centos.org is not the best choice. This could be changed in CMS settings (xoops 'site name' I guess). All other prefixes should be removed to bring the related topic to the front. I am not sure if this is possible with xoops or if there is a SEO module available. Best Regards Marcus
On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 15:45 +0100, Dag Wieers wrote:> Hi, > > Something that is not helping us with Google is the prefix "www.centos.org - " > to every page of the website (including the forums). > > It is annoying in the sense that it pushes the important keywords to the > end of the title and sometimes out of view of regular users (yes, Google > search resuls are trimmed). > > As an example, seaching for "wireless site:www.centos.org" results in > titles that are missing all the important items: > > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Wireless ... > 14.7. Establishing a Wireless Connection > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Intel ... > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Hardware Support - Hawking ... > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Intel ... > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - CentOS 5 ... > Hardware and Network Protection > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - try to ... > Creating a Wireless Connection > www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Hardware Support - Intel ... > > This is awful, how would anyone find which of those forum articles matches > what they're looking for ? > > My advise: > > - Get rid of the "www.centos.org -" prefix for all pages > > - Get rid of the "Forums -" prefix for the forums > > - Get rid of the "Networking Support" prefix for the forums > > - Move the "CentOS 5 -" to the end of the title (or get rid of it too) > > Not sure if it is possible from any configuration, else we should hack the > responsible code to make it disappear. Can we put this on a TODO list ?Hey Dag, does the Wiki even have a Site Map? If not that can greatly help with the google searches (has to be submitted to Google). Also each page upon creation needs a way to Inherit The Current Title and the Meta Content section of the page code so it does not inherit from the Base Code of MoinMoin. JohnStanley
Dag Wieers wrote:> www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 5 - Networking Support - Wireless ... > 14.7. Establishing a Wireless Connection> - Get rid of the "www.centos.org -" prefix for all pages > > - Get rid of the "Forums -" prefix for the forums > > - Get rid of the "Networking Support" prefix for the forums > > - Move the "CentOS 5 -" to the end of the title (or get rid of it too) > > Not sure if it is possible from any configuration, else we should hack the > responsible code to make it disappear. Can we put this on a TODO list ?Let me take a look at the xoops config tomorrow (or this evening), but if it is there, it is hidden quite well like everything else in xoops :) Cheers, Ralph -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 194 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-docs/attachments/20090103/a307a561/attachment.bin
Dag Wieers wrote:> Something that is not helping us with Google is the prefix "www.centos.org - " > to every page of the website (including the forums).Its good to see people taking some initiative on the seo side of things, however most of whats in this thread seems to be oriented towards much smaller sites, and does not apply to us in a large number of cases. google has hand ( yes, manually ) setup site specific preferences for centos.org - to the extent that we have 2 google bot's on the web server 24/7. In some cases, forum posts show up on google's cache within 8 - 12 minutes of the posts being made on the website. posts to centos-announce will also make it into google's cache in a matter of minutes. JohnS: there is no such thing as www.wiki.centos.org - so I am not sure what you are talking about. Also, google does not care much about meta tags, some of the other engines do - so they are still good to have ( google isnt quite 100% of the internet search traffic yet! ). But google-foo in the title of a page is about 4 to 8% of the 'potency' rating of a page. Fewer the words in that list, the more the potency per word. Somewhere between 15 to 20% of the 'potency' score comes from what keywords other sites use ( specially those that have fewer than 20 url's pointing back at .centos.org ) to link to that specific page. Placement of words within the title, for titles less than 8 words, has very little keyword by keyword diff. eg 'baking bread' and 'bread baking' have about the same relevance for each word. However 'bunch of wise old men sitting around doing nothing but baking bread' and 'bread baking by a bunch of wise old men sitting around doing nothing' will have different scores and therefore usage for the words 'baking' and 'bread'. Forum moderators would be able to provide more feedback here : how relevant and accurate are most topic's for threads ? If they are bang-on, perhaps it might be a good idea to replace the entire title of the page with just the title of the post, drop everything else. <opinion - subject to discussion>. btw, SEO is all opinion and experience and very little real fact and reverse engineered ;D -- Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq