Site Visibility and SEO

[Nick]

Just a note....

We are #1 some place. And that place is the google search results for "Harbor Freight Magnesium Fire Starter" AND "Harbor Freight Magnesium Fire Starter Review." Not that anyone should care to any great deal. I just thought it nice to show up in a search not involving the phrase "randomland."

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=Rw&q=Harbor+Freight+Magnesium+Fire+starter+Review&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

[zourtney]

I'm sure you know, but I added a YouTube account for Randomland (username randomnets). There are a few little things up there like playing with fire, go kart videos, and some Blazer action. The Blazer stuff seems to get a few extra hits. I have a lot more video lying around that I could upload, but just haven't found the time yet. Is there any videos you would suggest? Do we have anything worth watching which may increase (legitimate) traffic?

Also, just about every site these days has a whole warehouse of little boxes with these "web 2.0" links. What of these services haves you ever used? A flickr page, reddit, delicious, stumbleupon, technorati, etc. I guess someone must use them, or they wouldn't be so prolific. If it helps us to be known, I'll sign us up.

[Nick]

I personally have never used one of those little web 2.0 things. I have used the results of some of those though, namely digg. Its not often but I do find things one use there sometimes (but that only because google but those results higher then the page that was being 'dugg' for whatever reason.) News by popularity is all that is though.

[zourtney]

I recently installed a Drupal module to allow you to enter [pagebreak] in a story to split it up into pages. Nick and I were discussing how auto-paged stories get indexed by Google (and the like). While looking through some Drupal forums, I come across a suggestion that I enter into the robots.txt a line to ignore anything ending in ?page=0,0 (subsequent page URLs).

What is not clear, however, is if this will keep these pages from being indexed properly. A quick google search makes me think they are not being index.

Some links, but no clean solutions that I can see...
http://groups.drupal.org/node/3472
http://groups.drupal.org/node/2348
http://drupal.org/project/cleanpager
http://gurpartap.com/node/19

[zourtney]

I see that search engine optimization is the rousing topic I expected.
Oh! Was that sarcasm?!

Anyway, I installed a little doodle that throws in "social bookmarking links." Meh. It's a little obtrusive. I never use those services, but I often find myself scanning pages for them, just to see if they're into the scene. Everybody's doin' it, maaan. But it's nothing to go swamp diving over.

Remove it if you hate it.

I want to make it smaller. I combined it with the (useless?) trackback box. That crap seems to kind of go together. (Can be seen here, at the bottom of the page) And the styling on that trackback url thing is gaudy. I just haven't found where to change it yet.

Remove it if you hate it.

[Nick]

I never understood the trackbacks and who would use them. Its a little odd to have those links on every page, but I guess thats the only way to use them. We should try and make them a little more unobtrusive though.

[zourtney]

Yeah, totally. To all that.

[zourtney]

Well, not that anyone actually uses Bing, but we finally exist on a search for "randomland." A few weeks ago, we didn't even show up when searching for "randomland.net".

http://www.bing.com/search?q=randomland&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n

[Nick]

Cool. I guess the server has worked for long enough to get noticed. Lets see if I can break it again.

[zourtney]

Oh, in regards to the uglybar thing I installed:
I was thinking a little collapsable div or removing all of the text around those icons and killing the trackback-url guy. I just don't know where do change that stuff.

[zourtney]

Since the move to Drupal registration, we have become much more popular!

...with spam bots. Brad already removed a junk post about a 1/2 hour ago. What kind of registration authentication did you end up using? It seems we need to tighten it down.

[Nick]

Just the default. It sends an email with a random password to the provided email. I guess they have scripts that can parse that out now. I will add a captcha to the login process. That should stop the rest of them. They have some interesting one. Ones that use fill in the blank type questions and the like.

[zourtney]

Ok. Is that implemented now? Hopefully we can keep the Russian gibberish off the site now...

[Nick]

Yep it is in place. I went with the image captcha, its works like I expected (more hoped) it would. It adds a image of messed up looking (but hopefully readable) letters for people to squint a little and try to type. I hope it not so easy that computers can read it. Another option is to make people do simple math problems, but I figured that would be as easy as anything else to have bots break. There are other options that we can add, at the moment we have the most basic option available. No more gibberish I hope.

[zourtney]

Thankfully, our spammer popularity has subsided. Does anyone every stumble across our site anymore? I know there was one dead link to an old wordpress page. I fixed that, just putting up a "I don't speak Korean" note and said for anyone to comment if they wanted the content back up (it is lost).