Search engine optimization is very, very complicated. I am not going to tell you how to SEO the home page in this comment. What I am going to tell you is how to avoid triggering a duplicate content penalty if you decide to make use of my idea for hooking new users on LessWrong.
No page should have more than 5% of it’s content in common with other pages on the same site. There are penalties for duplicated content. Assuming that you put at least 20 times as many words on the home page as the longest excerpt, and limit the number of words in the excerpts, such that they do not count as more than 5% of the content on the home page, then you should have pretty good protection against being penalized for duplicate content. If I was going to do this on my own site, I’d comment the code up and down to warn tinkerers about the 5% rule.
Probably the easiest way to do this is show only a limited number of words from excerpts at one time, and rotate them so that every time you load the home page you get a new one (but it never scrolls away or gets replaced—that interrupts one while reading it).
This is important: If you paste 5 billion excerpts into the home page code and rotate them with java script, the search engine will still see all the ones that are hiding in there and include them as content. They can be counted toward your duplicate content limit. The best way to keep them from composing more than 5% of the text is to use CGI to output one at a time. Then the others are hidden. Your web host or software might already have a random quote generator, and it might be as simple as feeding it the excerpts and pasting a small block of code onto the home page.
You can put a little “random excerpt” link in there so that users can enjoy the addicted clicking that gets them new excerpts when they want them. The “random excerpt” link would simply refresh the home page. (Link the page back to itself. Simple.)
Another cool bonus to this is that if you add new excerpts every so often, your home page will always have new content. This can be good for getting more search engine attention as well as user attention.
Home Page vs Search Engines
Search engine optimization is very, very complicated. I am not going to tell you how to SEO the home page in this comment. What I am going to tell you is how to avoid triggering a duplicate content penalty if you decide to make use of my idea for hooking new users on LessWrong.
No page should have more than 5% of it’s content in common with other pages on the same site. There are penalties for duplicated content. Assuming that you put at least 20 times as many words on the home page as the longest excerpt, and limit the number of words in the excerpts, such that they do not count as more than 5% of the content on the home page, then you should have pretty good protection against being penalized for duplicate content. If I was going to do this on my own site, I’d comment the code up and down to warn tinkerers about the 5% rule.
Probably the easiest way to do this is show only a limited number of words from excerpts at one time, and rotate them so that every time you load the home page you get a new one (but it never scrolls away or gets replaced—that interrupts one while reading it).
This is important: If you paste 5 billion excerpts into the home page code and rotate them with java script, the search engine will still see all the ones that are hiding in there and include them as content. They can be counted toward your duplicate content limit. The best way to keep them from composing more than 5% of the text is to use CGI to output one at a time. Then the others are hidden. Your web host or software might already have a random quote generator, and it might be as simple as feeding it the excerpts and pasting a small block of code onto the home page.
You can put a little “random excerpt” link in there so that users can enjoy the addicted clicking that gets them new excerpts when they want them. The “random excerpt” link would simply refresh the home page. (Link the page back to itself. Simple.)
Another cool bonus to this is that if you add new excerpts every so often, your home page will always have new content. This can be good for getting more search engine attention as well as user attention.