Site Visibility and SEO

[Nick]

Google did forget we had a sitemap for some reason. Fixing that.


And as freaking always: http://www.randomland.com/ They think they can trademark that huh? Not for less then $$$$$$ they cant. We have so much prior possession or whatever its not funny. So sad. Too many people out there defiling the randomland name. How do we protect it (without spending lots of moneies.) I guess we just need to be so awesome that we dominate the search results for anything random related!

[Nick]

I guess we need to learn how to work with google as it seems google isn't able to work with us (we are a simple drupal site with some SMF forums, that combination exists in thousands of instances all over the web. Why cant they just spider us properly!?)

[zourtney]

I don't know. It's kind of frustrating because we just have a simple site with about 50 text articles and a like 1500 forum posts. That's not abnormal at all!

And is it just me, or does that randomland.com logo look way too much like the Enron logo?

[Nick]

It does in deed. Its also backwards. And I don't like it Jerks

Maybe that a little too harsh

[Nick]

Messing around with the google webmaster tools I found an option to make it display the site URL with or without the www in search results. I set it to not use the www. Its just as easy to make it add the www to links without it.

What one should we use?

[zourtney]

I've been setting up all manually created links without the www. It's cleaner, in my opinion. It's shorter and the 'www' has no real purpose and adds no useful information, in my opinion. I say we stick with 'randomland.net'

[Nick]

It is done. Google says it might take a while for it to show up in the search results that way.

[zourtney]

A quick search indicates that google is now spidering in a very obnoxious fashion -- appending senseless or unused subdomains and using both randomland.net and randomland . gotdns.com* domain names. Also, the old gallery is now, very clearly getting spidered. We should probably remove all links to that unless we plan to use it...

* sorry about the random spaces. I made the forum think that 'randomland . gotdns.com' is a bad word. It auto-replaces it with 'randomland.net'

[Nick]

Haha. Ok. We should set the googlebots to ignore the other URLs. And since we have had randomland.net working reliably I think we can 86 the other domains. I don't know where google would be finding them. I don't know of anyplace that links to them.


Update: randomland.net now has its own virtual server. It points to a page telling people to go to randomland.net. I am sure there is a better solution. A DNS level redirect would do the trick, but dyndns.com does not offer that ability short of paying them more then I want to spend. They also removed the option to use domain wildcards (*.whatever.com) on free accounts, but rl.gotdns seems to be grandfathered in.

[zourtney]

Somehow, we have totally slipped off Google's radar for even a direct search for 'randomland.' It doesn't appear that there is any new contenders...we just disappeared. Did our sitemap die? Or could it be something else entirely? I'm not too familiar with our setup.

[Nick]

There is something wrong with the drupal portion of the site. It gives google (and anything that uses a wget type browser) a 500 server error. Not the forums though. I am not sure what the issue is but the time that it started roughly corresponds to to the last time I updated the drupal install.

[zourtney]

Hmm, that does suck. Not that Randomland was ever some "great internet haven for the masses," or anything. But still...

That sounds like an problem that a lot of people would want to fix quickly. If indeed we are not the only ones having this issue.

[Nick]

Fixed. We can now be indexed by google. I also updated the site map module so Google will stop rejecting out site map (it refuses to use site maps with duplicate entries... and it sees randomland.net/ and randomland.net/index.php as the same thing... I think) So hopefully we will be back on the charts. For a while 'raptor egg' was a bit of a 'hit'.

[zourtney]

This is somewhat related to the topic at hand...

Let's shut down randomland.net@gmail.com. We now have the Google Apps account, so let's pipe everything through, say webmaster@randomland.net under the moniker randomnets? I have attempted to do this with the YouTube account. In the process, I hosed it...but it might be recoverable (I'm trying to re-open randomnets on YouTube at the moment).

Update: YouTube account successfully linked with webmaster@randomland.net account. What (if any) other accounts utilize the randomland.net@gmail.com email address?

[Nick]

Here, here!