> and <meta.. content pretty irrelevant in determining search engine > rankings. However, in the last few years we've gone back to almost > Altavista-style reliance on these factors, combined with a less potent > dose of pagerank. God, it's like being back in 1997! You can't imagine how surprised I was, actually, when I discovered that my <title> trick had really worked - I've obviously been completely out of touch with the latest trends in searching. > Talking about this to Chris Schmidt he suggested (though without being > convinced ;) using the "summary" field to populate the description > meta tag. I've just implemented this on the OGMK, so we'll wait and > see what happens. Two other suggestions for Guide admins/developers: I think that's a great idea and have just implemented it in the distribution. http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/97 > - Kill the "Home" in the <title> tag on Guide home pages and just > leave the site_name there. Position of words in <title> tags really > matters, and "Home" just doesn't cut it. No kidding? Well, I'll strip it out of the template if nobody objects. > - How about a "tags" field in the edit page, for some > folksonomic-style tagging of pages? This would serve to populate the > keywords meta tag, and hopefully be useful in other ways, though I > imagine it would entail some fairly detailed hacking of the OG > codebase. I'm going to reply to this when replying to Chris's comments. -- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/ --===============2834000416979126537==--

From openguides@downlode.org Fri Apr 7 14:10:36 2006 From: Earle Martin To: openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org Subject: Re: [OGDev] Re: [OGL] Google searches Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2006 14:10:36 +0100 Message-ID: <20060407131036.GB17369@mythix.realprogrammers.com> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============2834000416979126537==" --===============2834000416979126537== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 11:54:17AM +0100, Tom Heath wrote: > My firm belief is that we should really optimise the OGs to use these > metatags. Until blogging largely killed it, PageRank had made > and <meta.. content pretty irrelevant in determining search engine > rankings. However, in the last few years we've gone back to almost > Altavista-style reliance on these factors, combined with a less potent > dose of pagerank. God, it's like being back in 1997! You can't imagine how surprised I was, actually, when I discovered that my <title> trick had really worked - I've obviously been completely out of touch with the latest trends in searching. > Talking about this to Chris Schmidt he suggested (though without being > convinced ;) using the "summary" field to populate the description > meta tag. I've just implemented this on the OGMK, so we'll wait and > see what happens. Two other suggestions for Guide admins/developers: I think that's a great idea and have just implemented it in the distribution. http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/97 > - Kill the "Home" in the <title> tag on Guide home pages and just > leave the site_name there. Position of words in <title> tags really > matters, and "Home" just doesn't cut it. No kidding? Well, I'll strip it out of the template if nobody objects. > - How about a "tags" field in the edit page, for some > folksonomic-style tagging of pages? This would serve to populate the > keywords meta tag, and hopefully be useful in other ways, though I > imagine it would entail some fairly detailed hacking of the OG > codebase. I'm going to reply to this when replying to Chris's comments. -- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/ --===============2834000416979126537==--