Howdy, >> Yeah I can set this up shortly; however as is this will redirect google >> itself and any other engines -- IOW the content will stop being indexed. > > ahh argh, well spotted.
I pointed that out earlier too: Actually, with one status of either 301. 302 or 307 the spider should understand that the resource has moved _temporarily_ only. But we'd probably have to test it, whether our friend gg spider still likes to come back to the same original URL. Really, it seems to be Google only that finds this resource. Yahoo seems to find osdir.com, primarily. Bing finds real pyjamas in France when you search for pyjs -- in Redmont they suck. (I tried "pyjs pyjamas t-shirt") >> There is another option, albeit a bit hackier, and that's to use an Apache >> module to dynamically wrap the plain txt message with a template containing >> either a JavaScript/meta redirect, or a simple button that says "click to >> view in app reader" >> >> ... a bit trickier, but I think the last is the best. Google and friends >> don't like being tricked (cloaking IIRC in SEO world == bad points). There are 2 things that need to be clarified: 1.) The pyjamaslamson URL found by Google, is it a data source for something, namely for (e.g.) the MailApp? - If so, we most probably should not mess with it, neither enriching the markup nor doing (wrong) redirects. Otherwise we'll break the originally designed functionality. 2.) If we can mess with the presentation do we want it to be displayed as a typical website (maybe there is a lamson extension or configuration setting to have it formatted in a more readable/usable format out there??), or do we want to have accidental arrivers from the web being transferred to the Pyjamas MailApp for reading (which is JavaScript/Ajax/whatever, and has the disadvantage of not being indexed (yet?) by web spiders)? > *sigh* what i've been forced to do is to put comments in the HTML > which say, to the effect of "google etc, you are morons for not coming > up with a decent solution to AJAX, so we are forced to deploy these > tricks". > > if the site actually gets reviewed by a human the gist is that they > should understand what the hell is going on. > > but, this is a free software project: it's not being designed to > steal money from google in the name of profit-maximisation, so all in > all using such tricks - because they're simple and effective - is ok. I'm not sure if I understand what you say here. In the end, the whole purpose of the URL redirect I proposed is that we have readers that arrive by accident (i.e. Google Web search), and if that continued to work out we can get rid of Google Groups or whatever hosted commercial service for our mailing list. What remains is the usability issue: How can the accidental arriver navigate through the result they find (I want the thread, which is typically more useful than the single message). That's where markup solutions or the MailApp enters the stage. Peter
