This may sound like an obvious question, but where can I find some information explaining how to optimize my site so that it appears as high up as possible in search results? I am a bit behind with how sites like google assemble their information these days and am aware that robots will plough into your site in any case, but what are the specific things you can do to make sure they find the information you want them to find as often as possible? Is the first thing a robot will find the "site description", for example?
Best regards,
James Phillips, still beavering away after all this time, and still not completely sure if he is getting anywhere!
Interesting question. It would be good to gather this information together in this thread and then perhaps make a wiki page on docs.moodle.org, if that's been launched yet, it seems very low key at the moment.
Here's a couple of recent things that caught my eye.
Google's blog search
There's Google's blog search tool, which despite the name lists any site with RSS or Atom feeds, which includes all the Moodle forums
They will soon have a manual submission process but for the time being you need to ping a weblog update service. Moodle.org forum feeds are up there but I'm not sure how they got there. Maybe if someone was responsible for that they could explain what they did. It's possible someone submitted the RSS feed to the next Google service I'll mention.
Google's site maps
Site maps allow you to tell Google exactly what pages you have and when your site changes. You do this by creating a 'sitemap' using a program you can download from them, or alternatively just point them at your RSS feed.
It might be a nice addition to Moodle if it could generate these automatically if you choose to open (parts of) your site to Google.
Moodle settings
There's a moodle admin setting for allowing Google to log into your site. If you want the material that you need to be logged in to see to be indexed then you need to change this setting. Note that this means people can just read the content from Google's site without ever visiting your Moodle.
the usual stuff
Of course the standard stuff applies of making your content interesting, linking to relevant stuff, getting relevant sites to link to you. Making your site accessible (as Google sees roughly the same things as a blind web surfer with javascript turned off). Getting bloggers in your field to talk about it seems to be the current best method.
Hi David,
Thanks for the information and for your suggestion to make a wiki page... Please check MoodleDocs Search engine optimization.
Thanks for the information and for your suggestion to make a wiki page... Please check MoodleDocs Search engine optimization.
Please vote for bug 3278 if you want better search engine penetration of your site, or if you have the solution to this bug, please post it.