Hi, Monks, Gods, and pmdev'ers -

On a whim, I checked out a few of my nodes on Google and none of them showed up in the search rankings. Scanning the source, I noted that there are no keywords or description meta-tags in any of the deeper pages.

I realize that this would be time-consuming to apply backwards, but it would not be difficult to add a pair of fields to the new node preview page that would then be added in to the final result. Not being directly involved in PM development, I don't know if the storage of these fields would require database field entries for automatic page generation, but I believe the result would be extremely useful in promoting PM as a useful member of the wider programming community and would be worth doing regardless of the effort required. Even if only automatic tag generation routines were added, the result would be a measurable Google and Yahoo presence.

In my capitalist pig incarnation, we use automatically generated keyword and description tags to enhance the placement of our www.cpgjoblist.com job listings. The tags are generated from several of the database fields we already store, such as job title, location, and category, plus a user-supplied field for additional content-specific words. These tags sent our ratings to the moon in both Google and Yahoo, and I think they could do a lot for Perl Monks as well.
  • Comment on Making Perl Monks accessible to Search Engines

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Re: Making Perl Monks accessible to Search Engines
by hossman (Prior) on Sep 28, 2005 at 22:04 UTC

    the lack of nodes showing up in Google has less to do with meta-tags, and more to do with robots.txt

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Re: Making Perl Monks accessible to Search Engines
by planetscape (Chancellor) on Sep 29, 2005 at 06:28 UTC

    While it does not directly address the issue of Search Engines indexing PerlMonks (and IIRC there was a good reason for not allowing it), several Monks are making considerable efforts towards "keywording" nodes. Please see Keyword Nodelet / Tagging documentation and Keyword Nodelet for more. Furthermore, at least one of us has been working on small utilities to aid in this effort. ;-)

    HTH,

    planetscape
[reply]
      Unfortunately, with robots.txt being global, this is pointless. However, the engines that power Google, Yahoo, and the other majors are well known, and it would be beneficial IMHO to allow them to do what they do. I'm glad to see that some of the pieces are there, thanks to your efforts, planetscape. :D
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Re: Making Perl Monks accessible to Search Engines
by QM (Parson) on Sep 28, 2005 at 22:20 UTC
    Did you use "site:perlmonks.thepen.com", or just "site:perlmonks.org"?

    Update: Apparently that no longer does what it did. Have the links in the monastery been changed? Super Search still points to it.

    -QM
    --
    Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

[reply]
      It's been a while since perlmonks.thepen.com stopped doing what it does. Now it just redirects to perlmonks.org.

      MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
      I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
      ** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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