Search Engines

Search Engines

lasatalayas 1173184930|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Does anyone know if this Wiki gets trawled at all?
Be nice if it does as that would help us all.

Re: Search Engines

Peter Rogerson 1173186726|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hello there,

When I enter my name into Google (the only search engine I've tried this with) I get several entries, including this wiki. Realising that this could become a powerful tool if used properly (and being naturally verbose) I've established quite a few pages on which I've included what I hope are key words so far as search engines are concerned. I'm ignorant, though, and only hope that it works. If everyone did that, wrote articles related to their books and posted them as separate pages on this Wiki we'd probably get a few more hits. And, of course, all hits are probably shared by all of us. Hopefully. Maybe.
And we are supposed to be writers so we should have the combined strength of a room full of monkeys at their typewriters.

Peter

Re: Search Engines

Peter Rogerson 1174576519|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I've just been looking at the stats of recent referrals to this Wiki and there's one that stuck out. Somebody wanted Lulu breasts and was referred here by Google!

Peter

Re: Search Engines

SusanatLulu 1174633475|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Peter

I was curious and tried the same search :) On the first page of results was "Calendar Girls get dressed for Breakthrough Breast Cancer……..". The charity calendar has dfeatured on Lulu's front page.

Best wishes

Susan

Re: Search Engines

Peter Rogerson 1174649328|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I should have tried it myself. But there's another thing I've noticed when I'm looking a bit closer at the stats and that's a few seem to spend 0 seconds on the page. If that means what it seems to mean then is there a way of excluding visits of, say five seconds or less? A visit of 0 seconds can't surely be statistically helpful. Of course I might have got the whole thing wrong and it might mean something completely different, though I can't imagine what.

Peter

Re: Search Engines

Chris Bond 1174672264|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

The length of visits can only be counted when visitors click on more than one page on the wiki as the statcounter has no way of knowing how long a visitor stays on a page unless they go to another page and the counter code is reloaded; and they then get a time count for viewing that page. So, a visitor could, theoretically, spend half an hour reading one of your pages, but if that is the only page on the site they look at then the visit is going to be timed at 0 seconds. It just means that they have only looked at one page on the site and it certainly does not mean that they left the page straight away. The page they actually looked at is still given in the stats and so these 0 second entries could still be considered as being useful info; besides, there is no way of excluding these.

With regard to the breast hits, I'm not sure where Google has picked those up from on the wiki. The two possibilities are the feed for the Latest UK Items on Lulu and the feed for the UK Writer's Blog on Lulu, though I would guess the former. If the Breakthrough Breast Cancer calendar was revised, or a new edition produced, then it would be listed on the RSS feed for new UK items on Lulu. That's my best guess on that one.

Re: Search Engines

SusanatLulu 1175211031|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hello

I noticed today two separate visits to my pages resulting from a Google search, one from Toronto and the other from Tasmania. One had searched for a somewhat obscure ingredient used in one of the recipes in "Know Your Onions". I had included the term in the extract. The book is arranged alphabetically and has no index, but to get other obscure terms listed on Google I have started an index of the headings in the book. This won't pick up all the odd words (I might pick up those later) put may pull in some more readers.

You may be wondering what the obscure ingredient was! Another thought is that talking here in a forum that our visitors can read is a bit like talking behind people's backs. I don't want to mention the term in case the same searcher picks up the term in this forum!

Chris - is it possible to have a 'private' part of the forum where we can discuss things that we would rather the public did not read?? Such as how to pull in more readers??

Susan

Re: Search Engines

Chris Bond 1175276560|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi Susan.

I'm not sure if parts of the forum can be made private, but parts of the site in general can be. So it may be possible to set up a wiki page which is a regular wiki page, albeit inaccessible to non-members, but where we could add such forum posts one underneath the other. Obviously it wouldn't work in the same way as the forum, but would ensure privacy. I'll have a look and see what I can do.

New Private UK Wiki Lulu

Chris Bond 1175297907|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I have created a new Private UK Wiki Lulu for the reasons stated by Susan in her post above. This site contains a forum, as requested, and I also thought that private member's pages where we can try out new ideas for pages and content without having them open to public scrutiny before deciding whether or not to copy them to the full UK Wiki Lulu would be a useful tool. All present members of the UK Wiki Lulu have been invited to join, and Peter, Susan and Taff will be added as Administrators with full rights, including the ability to invite other members to become either Moderators or Administrators, as soon as they accept the invitation to join. Please don't invite people who are not members of the UK Wiki Lulu to join this private site, for obvious reasons.

It seems that, contrary to my statement in the previous post on this thread, it is not possible to make specific parts of any Wikidot site private. So the only way to do this was to create a whole new site which was, by default, viewable by members only. Obviously this one doesn't need to be as comprehensive or technical as the UK Wiki Lulu, but you are welcome to tweak it as you see fit. I will create a link to this new site on the Members Pages page of the UK Wiki Lulu. Only logged-in members of this private site will be able to see it and everyone else will see a page stating that the site is private, as also should search engines.

Please note that we are, at present, limited to 50 members for private Wikidot sites. This can be raised by contacting the Wikidot admin, but there's a possibility that this may cost, though I'm not certain of this. If we reach the point where more are needed then I'll look into it. As the UK Wiki Lulu probably has more members than the vast majority of Wikidot sites, at least more than any I've yet seen, they may be more amenable to us.

If you are a recent or new member of the UK Wiki Lulu and you find that you haven't been invited please contact one of the Moderators or Administrators of the UK Wiki Lulu who will be able to send you an invitation to join. As you will already be members of Wikidot it should be a very quick process to join the new site.

I will also add this post to the UK Wiki Lulu thread in the Help Forum and make it sticky so that new members will be able to find it.

last edited on 1175301157|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Chris Bond + show more

Re: Search Engines

Minpin 1183016491|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I know in other forums that I belong my posts are indexed by google mainly because I have a signature (link to my web site using a keyword) that appears at the bottom of each post I make and the more relevant my post is to that signature the more likely it is to be indexed.

For example from the TIP - UK Based SEO Forum I have around 100 back links, hope this information is useful

Re: Search Engines

Chris Bond 1193503374|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Have just added a link in the side menu to a Swicki search engine I've just created. The search engine has a tag cloud showing popular searches, though I've had to add some to get it going. Each result thrown up by any search can be voted for if considered relevant, or voted against if considered irrelevant. This way the results will, in time, become more and more relevant to the interests of UK Lulu members. The results are multimedia and will show webpages, pictures and video. If you know of a webpage not featured in any results and think that it ought to be there, you can add it by clicking on the 'write your own result' link underneath the search box.

Give it a try and see what you think. It should make Susan happy as her Lulu pages are featuring quite prominently in the results.

last edited on 1193503887|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Chris Bond + show more