I thought this would be better to post as a discussion rather then a contact. Simply because there’s a lot of SEO’s here and we can all help a site we all enjoy:
http://sphinn.com/GoogleSearching/Is-Matt-Cutts-penalized---/
http://sphinn.com/story.php?id=3921
http://sphinn.com/story/3921
These are different URL’s all being linked from various areas of the site. The story page, the homepage and the Sphinn Live page all link to different URL’s
I’m sure you are probably aware of this Danny so feel free to remove it if you so wish.
8 Comments
http://sphinn.com/GoogleSearching/Is-Matt-Cutts-penalized---/
http://sphinn.com/story.php?id=3921
http://sphinn.com/story/3921
These are different URL’s all being linked from various areas of the site. The story page, the homepage and the Sphinn Live page all link to different URL’s
I’m sure you are probably aware of this Danny so feel free to remove it if you so wish.
8 Comments
Comments
Plus you have a 404 here: http://sphinn.com/robots.txt I know, won’t hurt things, but doesn’t hurt to drop a blank one in either.
Danny, it looks like about 90% of the site is supp right now, not sure if that’s a concern or not, but having the link juice split between identical copies of the pages might be affecting that. Also, is this the Sitemaps verify code?
Oh, also (I would edit instead of triple posting, but the link to do so isn’t there any more): http://sphinn.com/SEMIndustry/The-ldquoNew-Virgin-of-One-Way-Linkingrdquo/ Can probably get away with filtering out the html codes for the quotes from the urls, they probably only dilute any benefit that having se friendly urls gives.
Yep, much of this is known and on the list of last things to be stamped out. http://sphinn.com/story/3921 is the style we prefer to have out there. The other ways are how you can access stories in a few remaining places or if you know how the Pligg software works. The URLs with words are particularly bad, because if a post’s title changes, the URL changes. But as I said, we’re working to finish up stuff to hopefully kill off those alternatives. Not surprised much of the site is in supplemental, nor am I concerned much. At the moment, comments come out of JavaScript, so they don’t get indexed at all -- which means there’s little content for the search engines to latch onto anyway. That needs to be fixed first. Even when it is fixed, I’m not expecting the site to pull search traffic in the long term. This is because Sphinn doesn’t have a lot of original content. The discussions, absolutely -- those are great for search engines to grab. News submissions, if they also generate discussion, also deserve search traffic. But news submissions with few Sphinns that don’t go beyond the original story. I honestly hope we don’t become like Digg where our authority might stomp all over the original story if we don’t add real value. I also think that sites that build off of original content like this won’t see the search success in the future that they’ve had in the past. To me, they’ll have to rely more on their inherent viral nature. Tell you what -- how about we all work to get Google to make Sphinn into a powerful authority site? Then I can test how well things work over time. You know, purely research to benefit the greater SEO community. I mean, the traffic would be nice and all... :)
"...how about we all work to get Google to make Sphinn into a powerful authority site?" I thought that’s what we were doing...? ;-)
Well I’ve certainly sent a few links in Sphinn’s direction ;)
You got a link from my SEO Blog Danny: http://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/2007/07/16/sphinncom-new-social-media-site-for-search-engine-marketing/ I submitted it to Dmoz last night, I will add a listing at my Biz-Dir.
As I advise my clients, don’t just seek links but make them work for you. Ignoring the long-term goal of strict URLs, why not create a few categorical landing pages and encourage linking to those? Here’s one : http://sphinn.com/category/SearchMarketing/parent_name/Search%20Marketing and here’s another: http://sphinn.com/category/SocialMedia/parent_name/Social%20Media Put a 301 at http://sphinn.com/SocialMedia-marketing/index.html and another at http://sphinn.com/online-marketing/index.html and encourage inlinks to those... you may like the outcome.