EN World #3 at Google

[blargney the second]

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

 

[Morrus]

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.)

That sounds doable. How do I check the pagerank?

 

[blargney the second]

I use a firefox extension called SearchStatus to see pagerank. It also gives you Alexa and Compete ranks, fwiw.
-blarg

 

[Michael Morris]

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.)

I hope this helps!
-blarg

We'll try and see.

 

[Morrus]

I use a firefox extension called SearchStatus to see pagerank. It also gives you Alexa and Compete ranks, fwiw.
-blarg

I found http://www.checkpagerank.com/.

How long does pagerank take to change? We're still at the 6 you quoted. Is there a time delay on it?

 

[blargney the second]

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):

#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

 

[blargney the second]

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

 

[blargney the second]

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

 

[Morrus]

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)?

 

[blargney the second]

Most likely. So going the other way might be better: redirecting http://www.enworld.org/ to http://www.enworld.org/index.php accomplishes much the same thing and is eminently acceptable to internet standards.

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