Research Project - Google

[Elliot Lee]

>From what I gather, duplicating content across sites can potentially
hurt rankings a bit. I would expect that this particular case would
not make a noticeable difference, just because it's common enough that
it's worthy of being special-cased by Google. :)

However, there are other things that can be done to improve search rankings:
. Get people to link to pages on the site (the number one thing by far)
. Make sure URLs (wiki page names) contain descriptive strings
. Have META tags with useful keywords and descriptions
. Have ALT tags on images with useful descriptions of the topic of the images
. Set up a Google Sitemap (see the URL Kostas sent)

(The Wikipedia article on SEO has a more complete list, but you get the idea...)

It should be noted that www.fedoraproject.org is third on the search
results for 'fedora' after fedora.redhat.com. The only 'competition'
at this point is the fedora.redhat.com, so redirecting
fedora.redhat.com (especially the homepage) to fedoraproject.org might
help a lot in this particular situation. If there other searches that
we'd like to rank higher on, then those should be analyzed separately.

Best,
-- Elliot

On 3/19/07, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> It came to my attention recently that by having duplicate content at
> www.fedoraproject.com and fedoraproject.org that both would receive a
> lower ranking in google's system.  As a result I've got everything
> redirecting to fedoraproject.org.  My Google-fu isn't that great so I'd
> like to ask if anyone out there would like to do some research to find
> out how we can increase our hits.  Would a robot file help?  I honestly
> have no idea.  Anyone interested?