Some time ago, I decided to learn a little bit about Google Pagerank. I wanted to improve my site’s rankings in Google’s search results. I learned about Google-dancing and many of the sports that involve optimizing your page in search results. So I took the advice and redid a lot of my page to work with what I knew. Those of you that actually follow my blog have seen changes: tags, topics, changes to my XML feeds, new prettier URLs, etc. I keep track of all referers when someone hits my blog. I see Yahoo! Slurp and the Googlebot crawl me everyday. But then I started noticing something. I started seeing really simple Google searches refering to me. As of this writing, by typing:
into Google, blog.adamscheinberg.com returns as the FIRST result. In fact, if you just search for “picasaweb,” I’m the fifth result, ranked only behind Google itself, ZDNet, and Miguel de Icaza. I have a ton of traffic coming to my Picasaweb vs. Flickr article, and lots of traffic goes to my “I want Picasa on Mac” article, even though it’s mostly worthless other than me pining away.
Anyway, I definitely want to make the same types of changes on OSNews, because clearly we could always use a boost in search engine results. As a direct result of the boost blog.adamscheinberg.com has seen, I think I’ll be adding friendly URLs to OSNews in the next few days.
Please, only do these pretty urls for the links linked from the desktop’s version front page, not from other pages. This can really screw up stuff, especially with mobile. If we could do without them, I would much prefer it. OSNews does well with google anyway.