Posted by jane d on October 15, 2009, at 6:40:50
In reply to Re: Babbles Becoming A Thing Of The Future, posted by Deneb on October 14, 2009, at 22:56:42
> Dr. Bob, I tried doing Google searches for med info and other things, but didn't come up with Babble. I was at page 10 or so and still no Babble. It must be really hard for people to find Babble.
>Is there any way to increase Babble's Google ranking? Anything we can post to increase the frequency of hits of Babble?
>
> We need to make sure the rate of new people coming and staying off sets the rate of people leaving.
>Deneb,
I couldn't resist testing this myself. I think it depends, in part, on what you search for. For instance if you search for "abilify", to pick a fairly recent fad med, you're going to have to scroll through a lot of pages to find babble. But "abilify augment" gives babble as the first listing. Abilify + weight or problem also yields babble on the first page.It's also harder to find anything specific now because there is so much more in google. For instance you now get hits from YouTube and Google books not to mention every company and organization that now has a web site and reposts articles and press releases about just about everything - all of which come up in searches. I've been noticing this for a while when trying to look up non med subjects. At least today I wasn't seeing so many of those phony search sites.
I'd be careful about posting things just to try and increase hits from google. I'm sure we could have loads of fun coming up with suggestions (XXX +hot + fill in the blank?) but people won't stay unless babble is what they were really looking for. So no, I don't think copying abstracts from pub med just for google is a good idea. People who want pub med should go to pub med. (I did notice that an awful lot of the useless hits on the term "abilify" were sites that had pretty much just copied the prescriber information. I hope we never sink that low.)Anything that honestly made it clearer to the search engine what babble was might be a good idea however.
Bob - in that vein how about putting the word "forum" on the post page somewhere. We use "board" but I think most people now use forum. It's probably the word I would plug into a search if I wanted to limit my results to user experiences.
Jane,
rambling and it's way too late at night for her.
(something or other <> causation etc)
poster:jane d
thread:920080
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20090813/msgs/920995.html