MetaPost comments and questions about the messageboards and other parts of EN World. If you have a problem, this is where to go. Moderator email addresses are posted here.
Anyone got any insight into how Google works and how I can improve our placement?
There are two primary things that affect ranking. The primary one is the number of links to the site it finds with those words (lots of "4th edition" links to the site). The other one is by paying them money for a better ranking.
There have been known instances of deliberate manipulation of this (such as a certain political figure's website showing up when a search for "stupid idiot" was entered).
__________________ David A. Blizzard
"The only constant I am sure of is this accelerating rate of change" - Downside Up by Peter Gabriel
does the "french military victories" trick still work?
__________________ "I hurt Firewing." is not something a huge number of people can say. "He dropped a parking garage on me," on the other hand, a lot of people can say. -Kazan, my Champions GM.
Yay! The little things make me happy (this coming from someone who lived in France for five years).
__________________ "I hurt Firewing." is not something a huge number of people can say. "He dropped a parking garage on me," on the other hand, a lot of people can say. -Kazan, my Champions GM.
__________________ "The Soul of D&D?It's rolling a natural 20 when you're down to 3 hit points and the cleric's on the floor and you're staring that sunnavabitch bugbear right in his bloodshot eye and holding the line just long enough to let the wizard unleash a fireball at the guards who are on their way, because they're all that stands between you, the Foozle and Glory." - WizarDru
There are two primary things that affect ranking. The primary one is the number of links to the site it finds with those words (lots of "4th edition" links to the site). The other one is by paying them money for a better ranking.
There have been known instances of deliberate manipulation of this (such as a certain political figure's website showing up when a search for "stupid idiot" was entered).
Google never sells better rankings on its search results, though some other search engines do.
For those who are interested or care, I do know the basics of Google's crawler algorithm, as we spent a lecture examining it and its brethren in a course I took.
Other factors include the prominence of the words and their font and size (they are considered more important when set aside in large font at the top than when found randomly in the body of the text), the authority/hub dichotomy common to Kleinberg-esque algorithms (though Google's PageRank isn't exactly like Kleinberg's).
But the basics you list are correct--high profile links from authority sites on the topic or popular hub sites will indeed increase a page's ranking--
The simplified version: Picture a random guy on the internet who clicks links to surf through pages randomly based on prominence (though at superhuman speed), with some probability 'd' that he will get bored and start over at a random page on the internet. That's Google's web crawler. The sites that wind up getting him what he wants get higher rankings.
In the words of the algorithm's creators "PageRank can be thought of as a model of used behaviour. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at
random and keeps clicking on links never hitting “back” but eventually get bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visists a page is its PageRank. And, the d damping factor is the probability at each page the “random surfer” will get bored and request another random page."
Here are a few things that might shed some light on the situation:
1) Get your admin to redirect http://enworld.org/ to http://www.enworld.org/ as a permanent move. The former has a respectable pagerank of 4 and the latter has a (HUGE) pagerank of 6. If you redirect, then the www domain will absorb the pagerank of the other one. (When I did this, it bumped my sites from a 3 and a 4 to a consolidated 5.)
2) The rustmonster page probably comes up so high because the keywords are all in the title of the page, the url itself, h2 headers, and multiple times in the text. Note that the url format is strictly folder/document notation - he's got his blogging software set up to do that automatically. Google doesn't really like CGI stuff that comes after the question mark in a url.
3) If you're switching back and forth with wizards in the results, it probably means you're fairly closely scored. If you do the first thing I suggested, it might just tip you over on top. There's uncertainty because google uses lots of different servers to answer queries, and they all store their own slightly different versions of the data.
I hope this helps!
-blarg
__________________ Red Hot Swing
"In Inspired Sarlona, nightmares have you!" -Klaus
1) Get your admin to redirect http://enworld.org/ to http://www.enworld.org/ as a permanent move. The former has a respectable pagerank of 4 and the latter has a (HUGE) pagerank of 6. If you redirect, then the www domain will absorb the pagerank of the other one. (When I did this, it bumped my sites from a 3 and a 4 to a consolidated 5.)
Here are a few things that might shed some light on the situation:
1) Get your admin to redirect http://enworld.org/ to http://www.enworld.org/ as a permanent move. The former has a respectable pagerank of 4 and the latter has a (HUGE) pagerank of 6. If you redirect, then the www domain will absorb the pagerank of the other one. (When I did this, it bumped my sites from a 3 and a 4 to a consolidated 5.)
It'll be on the order of a few weeks (at worst) before any changes you make now trickle through all their servers. Your front page changes every day, which should increase the frequency that Google's spiders check it.
Incidentally, this is what I've got in my httpd.ini file (on a Windows server):
Code:
#convert everything to the www. domain
RewriteCond Host: (?!www\.)(.*)
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www.$1$2 [I,RP]
So when you go to http://redhotswing.com/, it automatically appends a www. on the front. The [I,RP] is the most important part, because it tells the client that it's a permanent redirect, rather than a 404 (which would be really really bad, obviously).
-blarg
__________________ Red Hot Swing
"In Inspired Sarlona, nightmares have you!" -Klaus
I don't know if it would screw anything up, but redirecting http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/ to the www domain would let you absorb another 3 pagerank that has been around for a very very long time. (Length of existence can factor into the rankings.)
-blarg
__________________ Red Hot Swing
"In Inspired Sarlona, nightmares have you!" -Klaus
I hope you don't mind me making suggestions in here. Since you posted this topic, I've just been looking over the site with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.
Here's another one: http://www.enworld.org/index.php has its own whopping PR of 5. It's linked from everywhere on the site in the nav bar | Site Menu | D&D / D20 News, and it looks like it's got a pile of external links as well.
Basically, in order to get as high a PR as possible you want to funnel everything into a single page/URL, rather than letting copies of the same information accumulate their own PR. A good practise is to pick the page/URL you want to crank up in the results and redirect vestigial URLs to that one. It takes a minor bit of fiddling, but it's seriously worth the effort.
-blarg
__________________ Red Hot Swing
"In Inspired Sarlona, nightmares have you!" -Klaus
Thanks - I've pointed Mike back over here to investigate the imlementation of those suggestions. I presume redirecting the index.php would screw up all the index.php?page=x pages though (such as http://www.enworld.org/index.php?page=4e)?
Edit: I just did a little fiddling around with URLs, and the site parser is impressively robust. http://www.enworld.org/?page=4e actually takes you to the correct page. The upshot is you could redirect in either direction, although funneling everything to the index.php probably respects protocols better.
-blarg
__________________ Red Hot Swing
"In Inspired Sarlona, nightmares have you!" -Klaus
Congrats! 
Latest Dreamscarred Press product:
27
Linear Mode
And yet another word from our sponsors
