Projects:Categories as Common Answers
Contents
What is this project?
- Use category articles that we already have as the basis for answers to common queries
Why are we doing this?
- To increase visitors to the site by scoring visibly for common search terms
What are the steps to create a single common answer?
- ...under development
Note: This is a variation and a quicker path to achieve the results that the CommonAnswers project anticipated. A key realization is that we can easily redirect a search term to the related category page and get the desired search engine behavior (needs testing).
To Succeed
- We need to develop a sense of how much content needs to be created on each page such that it is considered high enough quality to appear visibly on search engine result pages
- We need to have a method to look at the category pages we have and prioritize building them out
Test pages that we're writing as examples
- Category:Portland Oregon (Rich additional content)
- Category:Jonathan Frakes (Fair use quotes and public domain image)
- Category:Table Tennis (An older attempt showing subcategorization)
- Category:Jessica Biel (A weak attempt from Common Search Terms
Question: Does a redirect define a search term?
While discussing this opportunity last week we did admit that we weren't sure how google reacted to redirects. We now have some evidence that it doesn't work as desired. Here is what happened:
1. Ward created the page ESRG. This was for a specific organization, the Environmental Structures Research Group, which goes by the ESRG acronym. Ward was pleased to see Google pick up on this acronym within a day or two in spite of there being many other ESRGs including domains esrg.com, etc.
2. Ted renamed the page to Environmental Structures Research Group which might have been a good idea except that Ward had already mentioned that googling "ESRG wiki" was a quick way for group members to find the page. Now the important part:
3. Google dropped all AboutUs references to the ESRG search term after Ted redirected the page. Even when specifying where to look, "ESRG site:aboutus.org", google could not find any AboutUs.org page on ESRG. This is important because it seems to indicate that we can't expect redirects to categories to define search terms.
I have tried to use consistent capitalization in my notes here. But, I do not consider the problem searching to be one of capitalization. I've tried various capitalizations both before and after the redirect and found it had no effect on either behavior. Also, please note that Ted has kindly reversed the redirect so that we can expect google to find ESRG for us again soon. -- Ward 11:02, 26 August 2007 (PDT)
- We need the "category" page functionality for many of the rich search terms we're trying to create, so "Category:..." must remain a part of the article name unless the dev team can do some magic to get rid of the "Category:" namespace prefix. I'm sure this is more complicated than it sounds. We may want to think about this in conjunction with the category/tag discussion that we started on Friday. - Ray | talk
Google offers these tips on sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages. Mediawiki redirects within itself in a way that Google would have to special case to notice, but just might do so for Mediawiki.
- Very interesting, we have a little time in that we don't have so many articles with re-directs yet, but as this project gets underway we'll need to do something to address this. - Ray | talk
Categories with 10-100 Articles
Categories_Containing_10-100_Articles
