I'm number 338!

[elfs]

Last night I was doing some research into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for my pendorwright site because once upon a time I was on the front page of google when you typed in "science fiction erotica" but now I'm way, way down on the list. After doing some investigation, I found two reasons why. If you run a story site like Pendorwright, here's what I learned.

One, I don't have any meta tags. I should fix that immediately. Every story should be tagged with all the "fiction", "fantasy", "scifi", "sf", "science fiction," "erotica," "smut", "pornography" (have you ever noticed that describing dirty movies as "pornography" is terribly, terribly inaccurate since, after all, pornography means the writings of prostitutes?), and then the appropriate "gay", "straight", "furry", "dragons", "futanari", "robots", "thundercats", and so on.

Two, I provide my stories off static URLs in multiple formats: HTML 4, HTML 1, PDB, and text. Googlebot and Yahooslurp have penalized me for this because they think I'm gaming the system by having lots and lots of static repeat content. The fix for this is to install a robots.txt file on the front page that will tell them that those duplicates are deliberate but not malicious.

Comments

[kengr]

Just out of curiousity, what would you put in the robots.txt file to show that?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /journals/minhtml/*
Disallow: /journals/text/*
Disallow: /journals/pdb/*

I'd have to do the same thing for the other three archive as well. Basically, tell googlebot "Don't look in there." Googlebot will therefore see only one copy of the stories and won't think I'm trying to game the counter with multiples.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that's incorrect. There would be no asterisk at the end of the Disallow lines. The trailing slash, however, is still required.

[kengr]

Ah. Not what I was thinking. But still useful info.

I'm gonna be stealing some of the keyword you listed. I reaklly, *really* hate trying to come up with that sort of thing for my stuff. Which is why I don't have a PICS rating on any of my sites. :-(