The opendarwin .com debacle

[Scott Haneda]

On Oct 22, 2009, at 11:37 AM, James Berry wrote:

> So all of this comes down to page rank for our site vs that "other"  
> site.

Correct.  And if you look at the rankings of the sites that link to  
him, you will see, they have stronger rankings than those that link in  
to Mac Ports.

> I've got to believe we have better incoming links to our site,

Unfortunately, no, in my research, that is not the case.  One of the  
very best things that could be done, would be for MacPorts to have  
every maintainer of every port contact the developer of that software,  
and ask for al link.

I have done this for every port I worked on.  When I finish the ASSP  
port, there will be a link.  I did the memtester port, ( http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/ 
  ) and went to him to get a link.

I will be finishing the pureftpd port, and will also get the same  
linking.  What anchor text we suggest to use should be talked about, I  
am not sure that "MacPorts" is the best.  It would be a discussion  
worth having for sure.

> so if we better structured our site to do cross linking between  
> categories (and perhaps stoop to the subdomain tricks he does), we  
> could presumably improve this situation immensely.

We do not need to stoop to this level. See my more detailed email that  
was in the off list discussion in which I am pretty sure you were  
CCd'd on.

Matt Cutts, Google Search guy, spoke about this at PubCon.  While it  
used to matter, it no longer would apply in this case.  It would be a  
waste of effort and using a tactic that even if it did work, could  
change at some time, and be wasted work.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
( There is a video that explains it as well, I believe in within this  
page http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-answers-on-google-video/ )

It used to work, and since no site has come along to challenge the  
relevance of the DP site, he will still maintain the rankings from  
when that tactic did work.

-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *