The opendarwin .com debacle

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

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

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

I'm told by someone who does this for a living that it's all about the  
anchor tags, and also making sure that all the individual ports are  
promoted appropriately on their own page / sections.  He mentioned  
that there was a guide on google itself which described how to best  
optimize one's site for the PageRank algorithm, but I'm not able to  
find it just now.  What I did find were a number of other sites, from  
the rather mathematical (http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html) to  
the more succinct: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml

Either way, if darwinports.com is out-ranking macports.com on  
individual port names then I can only suspect that they're following  
more of the principles espoused at those sites than MacPorts is, and  
that should be relatively easy to fix if anyone is really motivated. :)

- Jordan