David Scotson

What do you mean by 'group' when you say 'this isn't configurable on a group by group basis'?

The descriptive text for the opentogoogle option that Timothy mentioned says this:

If you enable this setting, then Google will be allowed to enter your site as a Guest. In addition, people coming in to your site via a Google search will automatically be logged in as a Guest. Note that this only provides transparent access to courses that already allow guest access.

So Google access is first allowed by the admin changing this setting to 'yes' and then decided on a course by course basis by the 'course creator' or 'teacher' opening the course to guest access.

You might also want to try the Google search box on the very front page on Moodle.org and notice the kind of results it gives.

See also the other current discussion of the same topic.

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

In your CSS file:

#right-column .sideblock .header { background: red }

should target only the sideblock headings in the right hand column.

Is this the same as the problem described here in Bug #3623? If so then it should be fixed in the latest release I think.

Did I miss an announcment about the Open University? (5th paragraph in the the lead story by Martin) I was aware they were looking at Moodle but are they actually piloting/using Moodle to teach at the moment.

I'm keen to learn more as OU adoption would be very big news.