+1 to points -> paperclips :-D
I have previously suggested "Vote up/down" to "More like this/Less like this", to generally positive reception.
parent/children -> above/below? There should be something suitable.
When I put the word "rationality" into Google, the first hit is Wikipedia, the second is "Twelve Virtues of Rationality" and the third is LessWrong. How much of LW's low traffic on the word can be attributed to people just not searching on the word much? Edit: This was an artifact of searching logged-in - not logged in, it's not even on the front page.
Bending one's site out of shape for an idiot Googlebot sorta sucks, really. But on my own sites, Google supplies 97% of the search engine traffic. So I suppose one must do what one has to if traffic is a goal.
RationalWiki doesn't give a hoot about SEO, so has an accordingly poor showing and terrible pagerank. RW's hit articles tend to be stuff that it covers well that doesn't rate a Wikipedia article, e.g. Poe's law, Project Blue Beam, European Union Times. The whole answer to succeeding as a wiki is "provide something Wikipedia can't or won't."
When I put the word "rationality" into Google, the first hit is Wikipedia, the second is "Twelve Virtues of Rationality" and the third is LessWrong. How much of LW's low traffic on the word can be attributed to people just not searching on the word much?
Are you signed into google or not? When you're signed in, it tailors the results to your search history.
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:
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?