LessWrong search traffic doubles… despite Google thinking our site is a pro-family pro-democracy astrology blog! More on that in a minute.
First, The Good News: Since I started doing SEO on LessWrong (10 months ago) search traffic from Google has doubled! It took researching >200 different techniques—actually implementing 14 of them (w/ help from Tricycle) -- 2 of which I think are responsible for most of the improvement:
No-Following / No-Indexing a complex set of duplicate content
The analytics make me believe that this improvement is due to structural changes and not just generally increased traffic. But it certainly hasn’t hurt that people have been writing new content and that HP:MoR exists.
Anyway, I’m really happy about this! This was the explicit goal I set for myself 10 months ago. It’s nice to achieve goals… especially unreasonably ambitious ones.
So… YAY!! :D
OK, Now, The Bad News: So I was trying to figure out why we never get any traction for search terms like “rationality” when I looked through Google Webmaster tools. This is what Google thinks our site is about, keyword wise:
<col>
Keyword
Occurrences
vote
196504
points
152881
permalink
95106
children
84578
parent
56374
people
37047
it’s
27082
march
21846
february
21520
january
20425
human
19587
december
18005
september
15695
august
15667
password
15377
april
14714
october
14011
seem
12822
november
11546
july
11265
june
9283
world
8542
post
8496
actual
8251
probability
8114
child
7828
moral
7787
work
7143
might
6250
new
6156
theory
5827
argument
5639
read
5278
utility
5206
account
5002
evident
4777
belief
4749
remember
4691
recent
4584
intelligent
4582
science
4424
eliezer
4384
doesn’t
4339
rationality
4188
brain
3969
decision
3904
life
3795
username
3732
mind
3721
All the keywords that I bolded are purely structural elements of the Less Wrong site layout. And it appears Google actually is punishing our site for this keyword density imbalance. Google really does think our site is about voting, parenting, and astrology. And while I find it somewhat hilarious that our top source of Google impressions (27,000/mo) is for the keyword “babies”, I also lament that the keyword “rationality” is our #3955 source of traffic. We should invert this.
So does anyone have any ideas? How do other sites solve this problem?
LessWrong search traffic doubles
LessWrong search traffic doubles… despite Google thinking our site is a pro-family pro-democracy astrology blog! More on that in a minute.
First, The Good News: Since I started doing SEO on LessWrong (10 months ago) search traffic from Google has doubled! It took researching >200 different techniques—actually implementing 14 of them (w/ help from Tricycle) -- 2 of which I think are responsible for most of the improvement:
Reversing titles (e.g., “Less Wrong—OMG Scholarship!” → “OMG Scholarship! - Less Wrong”)
No-Following / No-Indexing a complex set of duplicate content
Anyway, I’m really happy about this! This was the explicit goal I set for myself 10 months ago. It’s nice to achieve goals… especially unreasonably ambitious ones.
So… YAY!! :D
OK, Now, The Bad News: So I was trying to figure out why we never get any traction for search terms like “rationality” when I looked through Google Webmaster tools. This is what Google thinks our site is about, keyword wise:
All the keywords that I bolded are purely structural elements of the Less Wrong site layout. And it appears Google actually is punishing our site for this keyword density imbalance. Google really does think our site is about voting, parenting, and astrology. And while I find it somewhat hilarious that our top source of Google impressions (27,000/mo) is for the keyword “babies”, I also lament that the keyword “rationality” is our #3955 source of traffic. We should invert this.
So does anyone have any ideas? How do other sites solve this problem?