Hi Does anyone know how to improve the ranking of wiki pages on Google etc. I work on The Psychology Wiki and we are ranked third if searching for 'psychology wiki'. which is fine. But if I search for 'clinical psychology' which is a link off the main page its about 2000th!! I know ordinary webpages can use metadata can we have anything similar? I have tried puting the terms on the main page so they dont show, feeling that the square brackets around the links fools the spiders, but that doesnt seem to have helped. Any ideas gratefully received Lifeartist 09:21, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi. First off, as a former therapist, let me congratulate you on a great Psychology Wiki to which I refer when time permits. Getting your wiki a higher ranking in Google search results is a really tough problem that just about everyone on the web has. My initial recommendation is to encourage you to find similar websites and email the webmaster and exchange links. The higher quality the website the better. The more sites that link to your wiki, the higher you will eventuall rise in Google rankings. Also I recommend giving a good thorough reading of this link [1]. This is an excellent resource for giving you the nuts and bolts of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is the art of increasing your Google ranking. Hope this helps! Email me with anymore questions at terry@wikia.com. All the best, Terry Foote 22:27, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

I would note that there appears to be a problem with Wikia sites and Google. I fear this may have be due in part to the transfer from wikicities.com - wikia.com itself has been around for a while (and remains well-favoured), but none of the subdomains have. All of the subdomains are now PR0, while before many were PR4 or PR5. They are also far, far less indexed than they used to be, although judging from posts on the google support

groups that may not be restricted to Wikia. I only see 169 pages on WikiFur indexed on google. --GreenReaper^(talk) 22:49, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your help good people. Having read Terry's SEO link and tried to search on "lifeartist psychology" on Google I came up on the wikia discussion pages but not on my psychology wiki homepage. This suggests to me that the spiders see each wiki as a link off the wikia site and dont get to us directly. They get to our front pages (which would be level three to the spiders} but thats as deep as they go, so they dont trawl the meat of our wikis. Do the sites mentioned with links on the Wikia Homepage fare better? If this was right we could improve matters by doing a no include list of wikis on the homepage just for the spiders. Or maybe wikia can find another work around I think the hierarchical organisation of my site might make all this worse as much of my material is 5 or 6 levels deep. Any thoughts?

I don't know much about this, but I have heard that Google hates hidden text, seeing it as attempts to game the system. From what I've heard, they have taken sites off their listings for adding it. Of course, that may be totally wrong, but it's something to consider in all this. -- 15:06, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, Google is now indexing pretty much all of WikiFur, though they did initally appear to index only two links down (we had made sure to have lots of the top links be to large categories, so at least the article titles were mentioned, in the category pages). Of course, we have plenty of links going directly to our site from other sites as well - perhaps you should look such into promotional options? Google helps those who help themselves. after all. :-) --GreenReaper^(talk) 12:38, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

would it be possible to have an update from Angela or someone, after Wikimania, as to the status of discussions Wikia have been having with the experts in this important area. The Psychology Wiki links still dont seem to be showing up on Google etcLifeartist 13:30, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I just wanted to resurrect the last point as I understood from the old forum that Wikia were paying for this advice. Has anything come of it?Dr Joe Kiff - User:Lifeartist (talk) 00:24, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi there, gil here. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming a billion dollar business... and we've paid for a lot of consulting - and Jimmy actually asked Larry Page (co-founder of google) to assign someone to help us make sure we do it right  :-) A few comments on Google philosophy and then SEO tactics

• Google' goal is to show the "best content"
• Their algorithm for best changes monthly, but is largely based on: Quality of content, number of and prominence of links to each page, freshness of content, layout of the page and metatags (hints in the HTML)
• If the NYTimes links to you, that's more important than if my blog does, and if another psychology site links to you (because it's relevant) that is more important than a sports site

What we're doing about this - it's a LONG term process

• We met with google to make sure we're not doing anything wrong that would make them penalize us
• We met with SEO consultants to optimize our software for google crawling. John and team are working on some projects here that will help - a little
• We are aggressively working to do PR - so the media links to our wikis. If any of you are interested in participating in the PR, please let me know.
• We are encouraging admins to add links to their wikis in their chat room signatures, their blogs, etc
• I would encourage founders to reach out to other wikis or community sites and ask for links - but beware that "reciprocal links" where Page A links to Page B, and Page B links to Page A are ignored by google as being "spam"

There are other things in the works, but for our admins and founders, my best advice is: Help us create great content, help us get PR and buzz (digg, slashdot, etc) by submitting articles or volunteering things we can use for PR, and reach out to your communities and ask for help via links to your wikia. Gil (talk) 00:37, 25 August 2006 (UTC)