----- Original Message -----

From: roger_galligan

To: irishblogs@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, May 13, 2006 10:55 PM

Subject: [irishblogs] Re: New poll for irishblogs

I agree with Dermod.  I was never very happy with having the cache
copy.  We put it there at the time probably for 2 reasons.  Firstly it
seemed to be what other aggregators were doing and secondly because we
could.  Both pretty bad reasons to do anything.  We put the link to it
in a very pale grey - which we thought we serve to decrease the link
value for it.  Rather than put noindex, follow - I think we should get
rid of it altogether.

I haven't noticed the cached copy do too well in Google, usually it's
the category or similar post page that comes up, and if the cached
copy is listed is usually together with the clustered content and
would likely not have appeared in that position were it not for the
clustered content.

e.g:
http://www.google.ie/search?num=100&hl=en&q=rte%20blog%20dunphy&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryIE

However I can understand how seeing the cached copy of your post ahead
of your own copy could be annoying.

Google loves to get clustered content.  Any clustering algorithm is
the flip side of a search algorithm.  So category pages and similar-to
pages are likely to contain more of the related terms to subject
matter at hand than the individual post.

I would say that 95% of the outbound Page Rank goes back to the
bloggers (many Irish Bloggers have said to me that we are one of their
top referrers after Google which also suggests that people are getting
their directly from Google). Pretty much every outbound link from the
site is to a blogger apart from the sponsors (by the way the
"sponsors" do not pay us a cent - these are projects that we take time
out of, to do IrishBlogs.ie and we still pay Servecentric for our
hosting but we appreciate the deal they have given us).  We're going
to change the sponsors java drop down closed so you'll have to click
on it to see them - we still have some tidy-up work to do on the
righthand sidebar, particulary the new "The Buzz" section. I don't
think we'll ever recoup the investment we've made in Irishblogs.ie
although one day we may make something out of the learning and
technology behind it, and we do enjoy working on it.

I think the performance of the category pages and similar post pages
in Google helps bloggers v. other media.  In the example above we
irishblogs appears above RTE and Unison.  I think this is bringing
bloggers voices to the attention of internet users at the expense of
mainstream media, which of course is a good thing.  I think that
IrishBlogs.ie has helped to raise the profile of Irish Bloggers.

I for one will be voting for Dermod's proposal and I'd go further - I
don't think we should even keep a cached copy of the full post.
(Likewise I don't think Google should have a "cache" option on their
SERP's).

I have another question:
If we put Google ads or some other advertising in order to cover some
of our costs would this upset anybody or what are people's views on this?

...and thanks Dermod for voting for us at the awards.

Regards,
Roger


--- In irishblogs@yahoogroups.com, irishblogs@yahoogroups.com wrote:
>
>
> Enter your vote today!  A new poll has been created for the
> irishblogs group:
>
> Should <a href="http://irishblogs.ie">irishblogs.ie</a> stop
allowing search engines to index their caches of individual posts of
contributory blogs?
>
> As I wrote in <a
href="http://bonhom.ie/2006/05/irish-blogs-indexing-our-feeds.html">this
post</a>, irishblogs.ie does not, at the moment, have the standard
search robots setting of "noindex, follow". This means that it is,
increasingly, taking traffic away from contributing blogs. Because
search engines hate duplicates, if a search results page has two
instances of a blog post, one will not be shown. Increasingly, the one
that is displayed is the cached post at irishblogs.ie, as
irishblogs.ie has greater authority/pagerank than most of its
contributing blogs. This effectively means that irisbhlogs.ie is
stealing the traffic of individual bloggers. People can read my words
and yet irishblogs.ie gets the hit, the advertising exposure, the
increase in pageranking (over time), and the opportunity to invite the
reader to click elsewhere on their site. That reader should, by
rights, be at my blog.
>
> The only time an aggregator should allow indexing of what it creates
is at category pages, ie a page devoted to all the posts with the
keyword "politics" for example. It deserves to get indexed by search
engines because that is what aggregators are best at: to gather
various posts together, creating original content. So a search for
"irish politics" should return the irishblogs.ie "politics" tag page,
and a valuable resource that is too. But it should not return any
individual Irish blog post that mentions politics, at anything other
than the source URL. Duplicating a blog post is not creating original
content, and it should not be allowed to be indexed.
>
> I am calling for irishblogs.ie to account for their policy, and come
up with a clearly worded Terms of Service for all to read that
explains their indexing policy. Irishblogs.ie is a powerful, popular
force in Irish blogging, and with power comes responsibility.
>
> Dermod
>
>   o Yes, irishblogs.ie should change its setting for cached single
posts to "noindex, follow"
>   o No, it's fine as it is
>
>
> To vote, please visit the following web page:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/irishblogs/surveys?id=2228497
>
> Note: Please do not reply to this message. Poll votes are
> not collected via email. To vote, you must go to the Yahoo! Groups
> web site listed above.
>
> Thanks!
>





__________ NOD32 1.1536 (20060513) Information __________

This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system.
http://www.eset.com