LessWrong search traffic doubles

[joke] Change the names of the structural elements to keywords we consider important! For instance,

• "Vote up / down" -> "rationality up / down"
• "points" -> "paperclips"
• "permalink" -> "timeless commenting decision"
• "password" -> "the teacher's password"
• "username" -> "code name in the Bayesian conspiracy"

EDIT: You know, I actually like the "points" -> "paperclips" change for real.

I am completely clueless about SEO, but the tag line "a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality" is part of an image file and as such invisible to Google, right? Making it equally prominently visible to Google as it is to humans seems like the sort of thing that would help. I don't know what the best way to do that would be though, alt text?

This is all inherited from Reddit, right? Does Reddit get a lot of search traffic for babies?

My best SEO advice would be to turn the structural links (vote, edit, etc) into buttons (ie post instead of get). AFAIK, google doesn't consider buttons to be as "contenty" as ordinary links.

Actually, Less Wrong does have a fair amount of discussion about babies (mainly about killing them). And I would guess searches about babies are several orders of magnitude more frequent than searches about rationality.

Edit: Continuing this line of thought, maybe an effective strategy would be to figure out what potentially receptive people are searching for and write some posts about how to apply rationality to those things.

It looks to me like this is just a raw count of word occurrences rather than what google thinks are the most relevant keywords, because I wouldn't expect the latter to contain words like "it's". If I'm right then the list isn't very informative.

Regarding words like "vote" and "parent", I think one way to hide them would be to put them in buttons rather than links.

This probably would be bad for performance, but purely structural sections of the site could be loaded in no-indexed iframes.

If we were dealing with certain Russian search engines, structural sections could be no-indexed inline:

Russian search engines Yandex and Rambler introduce a new tag which only prevents indexing of the content between the tags, not a whole Web page.

Do index this text block. Don't index this text block

Unfortunately, I don't see any indication that Google honors such a thing.

Your SEO problem with "votes" and "points" keywords is not entirely due to the comment-voting sections. It's also because of the short blurb above the main article-title.

Google ranks things literally from top-down (in the html)... and that blurb starting "This part of the site is for the discussion of topics" (class = infobar) - appears on most pages, and it appears above the H1 tag containing the article's title. Thus google thinks it's MORE important the main content of the article.

If you want that kind of thing to appear above the title... you can actually do funky things with CSS-positioning that will keep it below the article in the html, but appear to the humans as being at the top of the page.

I just noticed that in the recent comments feed, article links on comment replies to "Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline" go to http://lesswrong.com/r/lukeprog-drafts/lw/4zs/philosophy_a_diseased_discipline/ , which is a broken link because it's no longer a draft. That's probably bad for their rank, and it might be a more general problem.

It's a content vs. formatting issue. Words like vote, march, reply, points, etc are really formatting, but Google reads them as content.

To fix this, you could do a lot of JavaScript hacking so that the timestamps, etc are displayed using DHTML. The search engine robots won't run JavaScript, so they'll only see the content.

Well done, sir.

Unfortunately, I know very little about SEO.

Would it do anything to make the title be:

Article TItle - Less Wrong: a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality

Utility, belief, intelligent, brain, decision and mind are also topical, aren't they? Arguably moral, argument, theory and science as well. Except for the structural elements and rationality being too low it doesn't look too bad.

From https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--webmaster-tools :

Q: Why do my Webmaster Tools stats show common phrases such as "buy now" that are not directly related to my site?

A: While some common words and phrases are filtered by Webmaster Tools, there may be some that you use which are not. Having these words or phrases listed in your Webmaster Tools account does not mean that our algorithms will view your site as being only relevant for those keywords. While Webmaster Tools mostly counts the occurences of words on your site, our web-search algorithms use well over 200 other factors for crawling, indexing and ranking. In other words: don't worry if you see keywords like this listed in your Webmaster Tools account.

I couldn't find a more detailed estimation of the impact of such keywords, but we should consider the option of just ignoring the issue. Especially since according to this the only effective options are JavaScript or frames tricks, both of which would make LW significantly more annoying or slow to use.

taryneast's idea of using CSS to pretend-shove the opening blurb to the bottom of the page could be rather painless, though.

Great job!

it occurs to me that those most frequent structural words are embedded in anchors that have url's back to lesswrong itself.. seems like a decent heuristic for peeling apart structure and ignoring it?

Edit: I suppose my theory is that Google would make efforts to ignore structural terms in analyzing topic, that this wouldn't be all that hard, and that the 'babies' effect is a coincidence.

For the months: fix the date display so that the month isn't written out.

I assume both the right and left will think that we support their cause because we're "rational".