[thesite] [t.e.o.] [Bug] Recent Threads on thelist ?

[Martin]

Warden, Matt wrote on 18/11/01 6:45 pm

>On Nov 18, Martin had something to say about RE: [thesite] [t.e.o.] [Bug] ...
>
>> they serve a useful purpose in boosting us up
>>the Google rankings as they're counted as links in the Google
>>Pagerank algorithm.
>
>Totally contradictory. They'd only increase google's pagerank value if
>they were the same links, not specific urls with "rating" or "comment" in
>the place of the article title.

Not contradictory at all if you take a moment to think it through a bit
more.

They increase the pagerank of the URLs with 'rating' or 'comment' in -
which means that articles on our site appear further up the listings. 

The URLs with the page title in question are also in the Google resultset,
separately listed some pages down. You're right in that it doesn't boost
the rank of the normal URL. But it absolutely does boost the rank of
an alternative URL to the same article. It boosts it a long, long way.

As you may remember, I did some research when I found my second
CMS article was for a while the first result when you searched for
'Content Management System' on Google.

The URL in question was the 'rating' one, and the only place that occurs
is in our sidebar... on every page in the site. Each of those links adds
to the Google pageweight of our top 5 rated articles.

>Regardless, though, I think the point was "how much is too much in the
>sidebar."  I don't want to see articles that are only one screen long, but
>the page is stretched to a screen and a half because of the sidebar.

Indeed. But there's more to the question than 'how long does it make the
page for short articles'. We need to weigh *all* of the pros and cons,
not just the simplistic "I think it makes some pages look a bit silly",
and reach a decision on *all* of them.

And I'm not sure that thesite is the best place to decide on something
which will drastically reduce our visibility on major search engines.

Cheers
Martin

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