I just noticed that my recent blog post on "Android multipart upload" is now top of the Google ranking for a Google search using those terms. And not even those terms in quotes, just those three terms. I guess that is because blogspot.com probably gets a high rating from Google, and I guess my post has those three terms in proximity, whereas other mailing lists have the same terms distributed throughout their content. Anyhow, it was kind of surprising to see my blog post so high up in the rankings. Google analytics tells me that that blog post is getting a lot of hits, and I even had a comment from someone asking for help with that issue. It seems odd that I would jump the multiple google groups posts with my blog post, but I guess that it is at least partly desirable since I was trying to write a summary of what I had discovered from multiple google group discussions.
I guess this is a phenomena that people noticed a while back. Google either submits blogger posts directly into its search index, or it integrates them at some other level. I imagine that companies may have noticed this, and a top "maximise your search ranking" tip would be to start a blog and then post regularly on topics that match the keyword searches you are hoping your customers will find.
Of course the main question for me is about whether there isn't a better approach to making summaries of discussions on mailing lists accessible. For example it would be good if my blog post summarizing multiple google groups discussions was automatically posted to the appropriate Google Groups discussions and flagged in previous discussions on the same topic. I guess a form of trackback on discussions would be useful, i.e. all discussions would show links to summaries that included them. Most of all I wish that the main API documentation would link to summaries of this sort; but perhaps that is overkill, is the general Google Search enough ...? I guess I think there could be some additional tools provided to make the job of the folks doing the summarizing easier, and also make those summaries easier to find for those getting lost in the tangle ...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I've got several wordpress blogs and they tend to go higher on Google than forums, Yahoo groups and even TEFL sites by publishers too. For example, if I write a post advertising one of my articles elsewhere, it is almost always higher than the article on Google even for the actual title of the article. Don't know why that is, but not complaining!
btw, your linguistics posts look interesting but am hoping they are only written for yourself because otherwise the fact that I couldn't understand must mean that I learnt much less on my (unfinished) MA than I thought!
TEFLtastic blog- www.tefl.net/alexcase
I think if you can't understand my linguistics posts it's probably because they are poorly written :-) I am trying to blog my notes on the papers as I read them. I guess my first audience is myself as it is probably difficult to understand them without access to the original papers. However I hope that someone other than me might be able to make use of them, but the extent to which I make them other-friendly is probably related to my own level of exhaustion - I think some of the earlier ones were more polished. I just spent three weeks on all theoretical papers and that is a bit heavy going for me and for others I think :-) Someone will probably start a meta-blog that summarizes mine for the interested reader at some point :-)
Post a Comment