People clearly want to increase our Google ranking. I've done this on
some projects, here are some initial thoughts.
1. Pick one page to promote
I think qpid.apache.org is the page to promote. The links we create to
promote the site should all point to this one page.
2. Decide which Google searches we care about
"Apache Qpid" - given our URL, this is particularly easy
"AMQP", "AMQP C++", "AMQP Python" - we can probably do well on searches
like these without too much effort
"Enterprise Messaging" - lots and lots of competition here, with long
established pages and big marketing departments.
It's best to pick a small number of searches we think people will really do.
3. Create meaningful links to our page from existing, meaningful content
It often works best to have pages lower down all point to a single high
level page, and to have as many meaningful links among the pages of the
site as is reasonable for human users - Google appreciates these links
as well. If the links aren't useful for humans, leave them out. Google
tries to do what is right for humans, and they actually punish sites
that look like they are playing games to hack Google.
Google likes links from content clearly related to the search term, to
content clearly related to the search term, where the link seems to make
sense. Tightly linked clusters of pages tend to do best on this. We
want these links to leverage the search terms in text, titles, or
directory names.
3. a. Doxygen
As a first step, I've modified the headers for C++ Doxygen so that it
(1) links to the Qpid home page, and (2) uses the term AMQP in the link.
I'll check this in soon, and we can add this to our site.
3.b. Mailing list archives
We could also add similar links to the html generated for our mailing
list archives, so that a header or a footer in each message, or perhaps
each table of contents page, or both, points to the home page.
If anyone wants to put links to the qpid home page in signatures they
use to post to other lists, that's great too. Especially if you post to
lists related to AMQP, that will convince Google that we're interesting.
3.c. Pydoc
I'll be generating html for pydoc, and I'll see about putting links into
these as well.
3.d. Wiki pages
Headers and footers on Wiki pages would also be useful. Again, there are
a lot of pages with the right content, we want it pointing to us.
Other low hanging fruit?
4. Avoid trying to hack Google!
If Google thinks you are trying to hack them, they can actually throw
you out altogether for a period of time, and your pages will take a long
time to recover from that. Use meaningful, reasonable links.
5. Be patient
It takes time to see how well your optimizations are working. At least
days or weeks to see early results, months to rise to more choice
positions. Google reranks things slowly to discourage lots of hacking.
Jonathan
