A Conversation for Ask h2g2

When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 81

kea ~ Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded but very well read blue and white website

The wiki article on h2g2 was updated in the past few days - would that change its google ranking?


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 82

Sho - employed again!

thanks Kea, Tiggy & jwf for explaining about the taglines. I use mine like that too - but it's not really made too much of a difference for it to be shorter - but I do miss the punctuation marks.

(btw, I see a fair few cars round hereabouts on the autobahn with the numberplate: K : EA, and it always makes me smile smiley - biggrin)


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 83

kea ~ Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded but very well read blue and white website

smiley - biggrin


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 84

swl

For some reason, my name is written on trucks, cranes and shipping containers. smiley - winkeye


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 85

You can call me TC

My sister's initials are TIR.

Where were we? Oh yes, the new h2g2. Thanks for telling us that the change to H2G2 was intentional, Eds. But why? It's more complicated to type.


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 86

Secretly Not Here Any More


(If you start zoning out, skip to the end)

The reason we didn't used to get featured on Google at all is that in their infinite wisdom, The Beeb decided to put what was called a "nofollow" on all of our links.

As such, Google etc couldn't follow any links from the homepage to entries - they'd get to the link and see a big "STOP" sign and wouldn't be able to make a note of what was in a specific entry.

That being the case, the only reason any entries were picked up was because people outside h2g2 linked to them, and Google could follow those links.

They've now changed it, but the fact is that we're just not as good at showing Google what they want as Wiki is.

Google wants to see the following:

Relevant page titles
Relevant content
Links in

On the content, we're even.

On titles, (ours have changed recently), wiki had "h2g2 - Wikipedia" whereas we had "BBC - h2g2". As such, Google would see that Wiki is about h2g2 first and foremost, whereas we're about the BBC first and foremost.

And on links, which is the most important factor, we can't compete. Wiki has millions of links just from it linking to itself. We have a few hundred thousand (which as I mentioned used to be invisible). Add that to the fact that everyone (papers, forums, h2g2) links to Wikipedia and only the BBC links to h2g2, and you can see that we're lagging behind.

As for the "very clever people" deciding? Nah. Nobody's ever looked at that results page. It's automatically generated by a line of Google code that says because Wiki has more links in and a better title, it's obviously more relevant than we are.



In short - Google decides rankings automatically on a set of criteria. Wiki meets more of those criteria because they're better at self promotion, and because the BBC hamstrung h2g2 at the start.


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 87

kea ~ Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded but very well read blue and white website

TC, I don't think anyone is going to bother using H@G@ apart from the Eds in some of the titles.


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 88

Gnomon - time to move on

Well, Woodpigeon and I got the BBC to change it so that Edited Entries were followed by Google about six years ago, and they have been ever since. The only change recently was to expand that to conversations and all Unedited Entries.


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 89

Secretly Not Here Any More

Ah, I didn't know that. Rich always seemed to think it was all nofollow when we talked about it 18 months back.


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 90

Gnomon - time to move on

No, I'm wrong. It was noindex and nofollow. We changed it to index fof edited entries. bBut it was still nofollow.


When did "Ask the h2g2 Community" get renamed "Ask H2G2"?

Post 91

kea ~ Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded but very well read blue and white website

Here's a comment from Rich earlier in the year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/F77636?thread=7434638&skip=0&show=200#p96016160


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