Play the Google Game! [Archive]

Francesco

11th October 2005, 00:12

INTRODUCTION
I had the distinct pleasure of meeting our reputable ranking member Vamsi in person this weekend. Inevatably we talked a little about Baanboard, and one of the things we both noted was how poorly our home away from home ranks in the search engines.

A current google search on the term 'baan' lists respectively:

1. SSA
2. IT Toolbox
3. BaanFans
4. BWU

BaanFans!!!!!!??????

BaanBoard does not occur in the first 200 references.

Here are some other terms and rankings:

Term: 'Baan help' rank: >200
Term: 'Baan community' rank: 5
Term: 'Baan ERP' rank: >200

THE GAME
So here is the game. As a team of 7.5k worldwide users who use baan and believe Baanboard is the only toolbox we need, we are going to hijack that number 2 position.

SSA can have their no. 1 throne, but we will be next in line.

THE RULES
The rules are simple for there is only one: Don't get Baanboard or Patrick in trouble.
The effect of link farms and other Google-steroids is questionable. Google is certainly aware of these methods and may actually penalize our score. More on Google's methodology later.

TIPS
1. Link, link, link. If there is no baanboard link on your homepage yet, put one there now. Make sure the word 'baan' is in the link. for instance, don't say BaanBoard (http://www.baanboard.com) but say Best BaaN Community (http://www.baanboard.com) .

2. Start a blog now. For the time being blog-o-spheres are great linking machines.

3. Use baanboard in your sig. On other forums that you might visit, but also here.

4. Talk about Baan on other places and as always, link back to baanboard.com

5. Suggest changes to BaanBoard.com that will have a positive impact on our ranking. To help you in determining what will work best, here is the official Google ranking algorithm (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741), not to be confused with the various urban legends about google scoring that you will find on the net.

So have at it! Go have some fun and lets see how soon we can drive IT Toolbox out of its seat. I will post frequent updates on our google score in this thread.

günther

11th October 2005, 09:30

I think this is a great idea! Some hints on "how to achivie good google scores" can be found at eg. http://www.nigritudeultramarines.com/ and (german) http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/58647.

patvdv

11th October 2005, 10:48

Francesco,

Sounds like you had a great time discussing Baanboard :) I think it is a great idea so I am all for it. By all means try to improve our ranking in a positive and constructive manner. Google ranking has always been a mysterious phenomenon to me to say the least. Since we upgraded to vbulletin 3 the low-text version of Baanboard (called Archive (http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/admincp/index.php?)) is available to anyone for reading including search engines. Even the old problem of search-engine-unfriendly-URLs is lifted by this feature. Futhermore, we are not blocking Googlebots in any other way, either through standard robots.txt file or bot traps. So there is no reason really why Google should and cannot index the entire contents of the forum.

The reason why Baanfans has such a high score by the way I think is a historical one. Given the fact that once upon a time Baanfans was indeed very popular and heavily used and the fact that Google indexing/ranking schemes have considerably changed since then, make me believe that it was much easier in the old days to get a good spot on the Google list.

Francesco

11th October 2005, 19:54

Notice how the author uses both words as often as possible, with links, boldened and captioned versions (emphasized), but always in a textual setting that is either relevant, or so irrelevant that its unnoticed.

I love the ending "chapter titles": Isn't ultramarine a bird? lol

Also noticeable is the use of correct css and xhtml. This scores some brownie points with the googlebots.

Now lets take a look at our opening page.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Description" content="Baan Professional Forum - Baan Online Reference - Introduction">
<meta name="Keyword" content="Baan, baan, BaanIV, BaanERP, iBaan, forum, jobs, support, reference">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" CONTENT="7;URL=baanboard/index.php">
<link href="master.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<title>Baanboard: Start Page</title>
</head>
<body>

<a href="/bot-trap/"><img src="baanboard/clear.gif" border="0" alt=" " width="1" height="1"></a>
<table border="0" cellspacing="100" cellpadding="0" align="center">
<tr>
<td align="center">
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td class="tcat">
Vote against software patents!
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="page" align="center">
<a href="http://demo.ffii.org/"><img border="0" src="images/nopatents.gif" alt="No Patents!" width="468px" height="60px" /></a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center">
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td class="tcat" colspan="2">
Baanboard.com Start Page<br />
<span class="smallfont">The most professional online Baan community</span>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="page" align="center">
<img border="0" src="images/signon.gif" alt="Baanboard Logo" width="177px" height="100px" />
</td>
<td class="alt2" align="center">
Wait for your browser to redirect you to the start page of the site<br />
or<br />
Click to redirect yourself to the <a href="baanboard/index.php">Forums</a> or the <a href="/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome">Wiki</a>.
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Other than in the metatags (mostly overlooked by search engines these days thanks to overabuse), there is no mention of the word 'baan'.
I think some copy on the opening page, with frequent mention of the word baan (both in links, text and emphasis) would really boost our score at this time.

There are also some non-conformances with W3's standard. Typical stupid stuff like not having alternatives for the graphics.

I will make some space available for anybody who wants to try his or her hand at a re-design of the front page. Just mail me your (x)html and I'll put them in a little gallery or something.

Remember, eternal fame and prestige can be won here ;)

PS
Pat, thanks for your blessing! I was thinking that maybe I should have conulted with you before posting this. lol

vahdani

11th October 2005, 23:14

Hi,

can it be that Google an co can be trapped by recursion? I noticed that in the following site http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/06/04/nigritude_ultra ,which tops (my) google list, there are at least two links to the same page!!! I have a gut feeling that this could be the equivalent to a slippery slope trap for the search engine robots! :rolleyes:

Francesco

12th October 2005, 00:11

And having said that, I need to go practice what I preach ;)

vahdani

12th October 2005, 14:06

Calling all robots! Baan (http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=25323)

Francesco

13th October 2005, 21:10

One of google's little mystery is their pagerank. This number is supposed to 'grade' a page based on importance and is used as a factor in the overal google score.

So for today let's take a look at pageranks.

This page, the one where I am currently entering my ramblings, has a PR of 0 out of 10. That goes to show that Google agrees that my postings are rarely important.
But how about the competition?

www.ssaglobal.com: 7
baan.ittoolbox.com: 7
www.baanfans.com: 5
www.bwu.org: 4
www.support.baan.com: 5

www.baanboard.com: 3

It is clear that in order to become a player it would be nice to have a PR of at least 6 but preferably 7.

So how is PR determined?

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

To see what 'important' sites link to ittoolbox, type in 'links: baan.ittoolbox.com' in Google.

The result:
top 7 out of 1,530 links
baan.ittoolbox.com/news/dispnews.asp?i=109
www.itworld.com/nl/it_career_adv/07022001/pf_index.html
www.anywho.com/cgi-bin/webdrill?catkey=gwd/ Top/Computers/Software/ERP/Baan
websearch.cs.com/cs/browse?id=95357&source=CSBrowse
www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=95357
www.experts-exchange.com/ Applications/ERP/Q_20911557.html
www.feingoldfanclub.com/result.php?Keywords=baan& host=www.feingoldfanclub.com&cat=1

interesting to see ittoolbox itself show up as the #1 source for links. As we already discussed above, loopbacks appear to work.

So what links to us?
Top 6 of about 3,150 links:
www.joeant.com/DIR/info/get/409/66372
www.baanboard.com/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiHistory
www.experts-exchange.com/ Applications/ERP/Q_20911557.html
www.andilinks.com/pgf.htm
www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=95357
www.baanusers.de/weitere_infos/baan/index_links.htm

Not only do we have twice as many links as ittoolbox, it appears to me at least that they are equally 'important'.

So frankly I am a little stunned here. If anybody has any theories I would love to hear them.
In the mean time I will go see if I can add a reference to us on wikipedia. I think that is a very important site. ;)

günther

14th October 2005, 08:57

On my desk, I have a german magazine that discusses search engine optimizations (6 pages) ...

An interesting link is Robots Validator (and Tutorial) (http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi). I tried to check baanboard.com but I got lots of errors. Maybe that's one of the reasons?

I had a look at the html code of baan.ittoolbox.com and I found plenty of things they make better than baanboard:
* Count how often 'baan' (as a single word!) can be found here -- and where.
* And now do the same on then baanboard start page -- and think of the redirect here.

One of the mystics of PR is called `keyword density'.

Also: Be carefult with duplicate wikipedia entries. I hear roumors about that google seems to punish on that.

j_hass

14th October 2005, 12:33

An interesting link is Robots Validator (and Tutorial) (http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi). I tried to check baanboard.com but I got lots of errors. Maybe that's one of the reasons?

The above link doesn't scan homepages, but only robots.txt files.
Scan of www.baanboard.com/robots.txt shows no errors (but a lot of disallowances)

Ehabos

14th October 2005, 12:57

Hi All,

Check this link (http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/diagnostic.go?www.baanboard.com) to check what a search-engine spider sees as it crawles the BaanBoard site.

Vote against software patents!

I think that the Start page is causing the bad ranking in Google.

-Ehab

Francesco

14th October 2005, 17:50

As I mentioned in post #4.

Again, I ask everybody to try your hand at this and mail me your work. I will then put them up for display and we can put them to the vote or something like that.

Of course the final say in this matter is with Pat.

What else?

Oh yes, I am still looking for a good scoring meter to measure the results of our efforts. I found a tool called 'good keywords' (or something like that) the other day but it doesn't work for me.
any suggestions?

Francesco

14th October 2005, 18:23

One of the mystics of PR is called `keyword density'.

From what I understand, PR and KD are different metrics.

I am puzzled by the low PR of baanboard though. Even my own site (www.admiralsolutions.biz) gets a PR of 4 and there is hardly anything linking to that.

My best guess is that we are being penalized by Google because our keywords in the meta tags don't match the content of the page.

So in that sense, you might be right about the KD affecting the PR, which proofs that sometimes the methodology is simply BS.

~Vamsi

15th October 2005, 23:02

Since we upgraded to vbulletin 3 the low-text version of Baanboard (called Archive (http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/admincp/index.php?)) is available to anyone for reading including search engines. Even the old problem of search-engine-unfriendly-URLs is lifted by this feature.

If we are depending on the archives to help us get a higher ranking - the problem could be this ... the siglines do not appear there. And hence no link backs to baanboard. Does it make sense to put the siglines in the archives as well?

patvdv

18th October 2005, 12:06

Hi Vamsi,

The software automatically strips siglines from the original post and there is no toggle or switch to prevent this.

Regards,

Pat.

JennyJ

18th October 2005, 18:48

You can use this site to analyise your site as well. It is quite useful. You can also analyise competitors and compare them to your site.

http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm

patvdv

18th October 2005, 21:16

The current opening page may not be the best way to promote the site I admit. It was setup to serve 2 purposes initially: a) to provide a gateway to either Forums or Wiki and b) to protest against software patents. Since b) is not really valid any longer (not for the immediate future) it is probably a good idea to revisit this. The most simple option is to set the root of the site the opening page of the forum, which is the most visited page of the whole site.

cuiwenyuan

19th October 2005, 16:17

i am so like www.baanboard.com and like Google's game :p .
so i designed one page for baan,named BaaN china fans(A website about BaaN ERP for Chinese BaaN Users and Fans). in this website,lot of links to baanboard.com!
here is the address,http://www.cuiwenyuan.com/baan/
logo as below,hope useful to Baanboard.com

Francesco

20th October 2005, 22:10

Here is a first concept for a new opening page (and css) for BaanBoard.

Comments, criticism, advise and improvements...please.

New BaanBoard Opening Page (http://www.admiralsolutions.biz/baanboard/index.html)

~Vamsi

20th October 2005, 23:45

Very nice job.

How about a disclaimer - that this is not related officially to SSA/Baan?

Is there an official word about spelling Baan. When I was at Baan, I remember seeing a memo about spelling it only Baan - BaaN was reserved as part of the logo and not to be reproduced as plain text. Not that Google is case sensitive.

Francesco

20th October 2005, 23:57

When doing the following search in Google: 'Francesco site:www.baanboard.com', the result lists:

Results 1 - 10 of about 5,270 from www.baanboard.com for francesco

This proves beyond a doubt that our BFBBB (Big Fat Beloved Baan Board) is getting spidered with or without the archives in the path. The first URL's all refer to regular vbulletin pages.

This also strengthens my believe that the reason for our poor score is mainly due to penalization. The only reason for penalization that I can see is the mismatch between mega tag keywords and page content.

Don't forget to add Baanboard to your sigline!

~Vamsi

21st October 2005, 03:41

You convinced me Francesco. I am in.

Everyone noticing this thread - especially the ones who contribute a lot of articles try something similar to my sigline. Keep pointing everyone to this article - do your bit. That is the least we can do.

patvdv

21st October 2005, 15:25

Francesco, not bad, not bad at all :) It resembles much of a portal page which is commonly used in a lot of sites as a gateway to other parts of the site. Some comments:

Looks and feel should comply to the rest of the site. For that, the CSS classes that are being used in the forum/wiki are to be applied. If you have trouble with that, I can either help or do it. You can rip the classes out of most pages with any good Web tool (like some Firefox extensions)
Search button: can only apply to forums *or* wiki unless we implement a layer in between that serves a pass-through to both the forums and Wiki, collects all the results and displays them together on one page. Not an easy thing to do.
Baan/BaaN: I think the proper name is now just 'Baan'. The name 'BaaN' was reverted back to 'Baan' already a long time ago.
Disclaimer: good idea to include that as well.

Some other ideas could be:

Include last x forum posts
Include last x changed wiki pages

But again, this requires some programming.

Francesco

21st October 2005, 17:40

Looks and feel should comply to the rest of the site. I used the existing css, but I had to tag on a few classes for specific divs and stuff like the redirect buttons.
Also, the h tags were not defined in the master css. Use of emphasis in keywords leads to a higher google score.

I tried to maintain the look of Baanboard (not sure about the feel. lol), but of course the primary purpose was to stash at least 40 occurences of the word Baan :)

Search button: can only apply to forums *or* wiki unless we implement a layer in between that serves a pass-through to both the forums and Wiki, collects all the results and displays them together on one page. Not an easy thing to do.Actually....I think I do see a simple solution for that. Let me try something. Other than that, I put the search box there mainly as a space filler.

Include last x forum posts
Include last x changed wiki pagesScope Creep! Scope Creep! ;)
The goal for this project is to get us the Google #2 seat. Additional challenges are reserved for phase 2.

mark_h

21st October 2005, 19:44

Okay - is this sig better? I also put a baanboard link in my sig on another non-Baan related vbulletin site. Most of this is beyond my knowledge, but how long does it take to see improvement in BB ranking?

Francesco

21st October 2005, 20:05

In order for ranking improvements to occur, a few things need to happen.

We need to be visited by a google bot.
The bot needs to notice a change in the information
The Googlebot needs to report back to its home datacenter
The home datacenter needs to sync up with the thousands of other Google datacenters

Ad 1: I believe it takes about 1 week for Google to spider the www. Pat will be able to see when we were last visited.

Ad 2: It's always hard to predict what excites the googlebot the most. I strongly suspect that we will not see any change until a new HP is in place.

Ad 3: It's probably safe to say that one database will take 48 hrs to process all the data collected.

Ad 4: until the entire google network is synched, results may vary depending on what database you are querying. It used to take Google about 2 weeks to sync there entire network. I believe they made some improvements recently that speed this process up, but I'm not sure there.

So to answer your question, changes can occur anywhere between 2 - 23 days.

patvdv

22nd October 2005, 00:21

Francesco, I copied your start page to the server and you can find it here:
http://www.baanboard.com/new1_index.html

I did some hacking on that file and this is the result:
http://www.baanboard.com/new2_index.html

FYR: i have copied the current start page to a static available page here:
http://www.baanboard.com/old_index.html

By the way: I am not entirely convinced we need to link to an infamous site as Baanfans. Does this fit in the ranking improvement scheme?

patvdv

22nd October 2005, 00:31

FYI: Googlebot is on our site almost 24hrs a day, 7 days a week :)

patvdv

22nd October 2005, 00:40

Mark,

I think your sigline is great :) I hope you don't mind that I am using it for my sigline as well?

Francesco

22nd October 2005, 12:48

There's a man who knows his style sheets :)

Here is the code for a search box that distinguishes between forums, wiki or both if you still want it.
Personally I think it looks fine without it.

<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
<div style="border:1px solid black;padding:4px;">
<table border="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td>
<input type="text" name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center" style="font-size:75%">
Search
<input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="www.baanboard.com/baanboard/" checked="checked" />Forums
<input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="www.baanboard.com/twiki/" />Wiki
<input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="www.baanboard.com" />All<br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</form>

As for the links to baanfans, yes it is part of the master plan. Because baanfans apparently has a high relevancy to Google, linking to it will increase our own relevancy.
Of course you could mask the link.
Google is on to most such tricks and penalizes for hidden text, but if you do the hiding in the css I am pretty sure the bot won't notice.

Finally, here is what I came up with for a disclaimer:

Baanboard is not in any way associated with SSA Global Inc or any of its
subsidiaries. With respect to documents available from this server, Baanboard
nor any of its members, makes any warranty, express or implied,
including the warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular
purpose, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the
accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus,
product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not
infringe privately owned rights.

patvdv

23rd October 2005, 03:09

OK, I incorporated the Google search back into it. How about the missing dates for the earlier Baan releases? Does anyone know?

günther

24th October 2005, 08:39

Patrick,

could you have a look at new_index2.html? Actually, it looks very professional - but it's not valid xhtml.

Regards, Günther

patvdv

24th October 2005, 14:00

Hi Guenther,

Thanks for pointing that out to me. I should have rechecked XHTML compliance of course after the last changes. Looks OK again now :)

Francesco

24th October 2005, 19:30

Page Rank: 3 (goal >= 6)

Google Rank 'baan': > 1600 (goal = 2)
Google Rank 'baan erp': > 200
Google Rank 'baan community': 1 !!!!
Google Rank 'baan help': > 200

Pages Spidered: about 143,000
Links: 4 ????!!!!!

--------------------------------------------------------------

COMMENTS:

So far no significant improvement in ranking.
Was I mistaken when I reported the # of links the first time? I tripple checked today's result and 4 it is. It would be 3 without Cui's recent addition.
We ARE the world's #1 Baan Community!!! ;)

Pat, why wait with putting the new page in place? It looks great and we can always make changes to it later if required/desired.

Francesco

24th October 2005, 19:35

Ok, here's the deal on links

Today I used 'link:www.baanboard.com', which is the command Google provides.

Last time I used 'links: www.baanboard.com' (from memory).

The first one does give only 4 results.
The second one gives 3,150!!!!!

Does anybody know the difference between link and links and why the results vary so much?

günther

25th October 2005, 08:24

Links: 4 ????!!!!!

I also get 4 by "link:www.baanboard.com" on google.

Meanwhile, I checked some pages. Any ideas why e.g. Baan World Users - Netherlands (http://www.bwu.nl/p_lin.htm), Baan Users UK and Ireland (http://www.baanusers.co.uk/page.asp?p=links) and European Baan Users Online (http://www.baanusers.com/english/european_baan_users/index_links.htm) aren't listed? They have direct links to www.baanboard.com.

I found at least one page (Baan User Club Switzerland (http://www.baanusers.ch/alg/links.php)) that points to www.baanboard.com/baanboard/index.php. Maybe that's another problem?

Günther

patvdv

25th October 2005, 10:20

Et voila, the page is up :)

Keep the suggestions coming folks!

bamnsour

25th October 2005, 10:58

This thread is a great initiative. Thank you Francesco.

1) The start page is a good move. I am not sure the history of the Baan Product is written in the best way possible though.

2) If we all go to the google web site and type some search words that enable us to then press on www.baanboard.com - this will make the ranking of our site higher. Some examples that work right now are

"Baan Board"

"baan patvdv"

"baan welcome sponsor nazdaq"

If lots of people do this from different places (better do it with different search patterns), this will make the relevance of the web site higher. Don't forget to press on the BB link when you find it in google !! If many people do this, the word "Baan" alone should return BB in the first page soon, and then by pressing on BB from a "Baan" search result, it will go higher and higher...

~Vamsi

25th October 2005, 20:36

Francesco,

Do you think it matters that the homepage is not referenced at all from any of the forum pages?

All references are to http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/index.php and not http://www.baanboard.com/

Francesco

26th October 2005, 01:35

Let the game begin!

Vamsi, Gunther, I am not sure what the consequence of low-level linking is. Maybe it is the difference between link and links that I mentioned earlier.
It is noteworthy that ittoolbox for example is only listed with its low-level domain.

Maybe we should attack the /baanboard/index page next?

But first lets see how much we game from the new page. I predict PR will go up and that will put us on the map at least.

Bamnsour, I thought Google didn't use that method (of course I can be wrong), to prevent clickbot activities and such?

Francesco

26th October 2005, 23:37

Started a blog today just so I could link it back to baanboard. lol

Not too familiar with the blog-o-sphere yet, but if anybody here has links to exchange I will be more than happy to do so.

In the mean time, check it out: IT Happens! (http://www.admiralsolutions.biz/blog/ithappens.html)

~Vamsi

26th October 2005, 23:46

I wish the vbStatistics add-in was still around. I have a feeling this thread is going to be among the most viewed and responded to in a while.

patvdv

28th October 2005, 19:43

Vamsi,

That could very well be. But so far these ones are the most popular!

PaTriton

31st October 2005, 18:47

Hello,

I started working on Triton 2.2b in 1994.

About Google, I would like to point an element often forgotten by webmasters to increase PR : the title tag.
So, I suggest to add Baan in the Title of Baanboard home page.

Patrick

bamnsour

31st October 2005, 21:02

It took few days, and... now the cache of google is updated with the new openning page...

Lots of yellow.

Francesco

31st October 2005, 21:58

PaTriton, good point about the Title. Also thanks for the historical update.
I should have noted before that the release dates were done from memory...very losely. lol

Bamnsour, good catch. I obviously don't know enough about the Google methodology because I would have thought that caching the page would occur simultaneously with ranking it.
I don't see a change yet in our listing, and the PR is still a meager 3.

Also interesting is that we lost 10 references and are now down to 3,140.

But it means things are happening and we will be seeing some results soon. Drumroll please!

mark_h

31st October 2005, 22:18

Okay - what is the difference between the Yahoo search engine and the google search engine. I see we have made strides on google - I believe for Baan erp we are now at position 100. But on Yahoo - I pretty much had to type in baanboard to find an actual link to www.baanboard.com. All the other places were sites with links to baanboard.com.

patvdv

31st October 2005, 23:25

Patrick,

Thanks for the historical info. I updated the start page. Does anybody else have some more info on the release dates of the older Baan versions?

The TITLE tag is actually used but does not show up in the page source. Strange. Will have to investigate that.

Francesco

1st November 2005, 20:26

I did a little googling for an accurate Baan timeline and I found this really great source of information (http://www.baanboard.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/BaanTimeLine). It only goes back to 3.1, but at least it appears to be accurate.

Francesco

1st November 2005, 21:23

I found an excellent tool to measure our progress in the form of Agent Web Ranking (http://www.agentwebranking.com)
baan
baan erp
baan help
baan community

I tested the keywords on the following searchengines:

AltaVists
AOL
Google
MSN
Yahoo

I posted the results on my daily baanboard ranking page (http://www.admiralsolutions.biz/baanboard/bb051101.htm)

Take a look. There is plenty to discuss. It also confirms Mark's findings.

patvdv

3rd November 2005, 11:49

A bit strange that the combo 'baan community' was picked so quickly and transformed into a nr 1 position. I also note the higher scoring on MSN which could be related to the relentless pounding of the MSN searchbot on our site over the last couple of months.

patvdv

3rd November 2005, 11:58

Mmm, something you forget to check the stuff on your own site first even :D Did some updating on the version history.

mark_h

3rd November 2005, 17:38

I think yahoo and altavista use the same engine. Went to see what the submit a site was about(for rankings) but keep getting blocked from work will have to see what it is about from home.

Francesco

3rd November 2005, 18:09

They will be taken of the report.

I will also limit the results to the first 20 pages instead of 50.

I submitted baanboard in the Yahoo search engine.

Pat,
Baanboard was the #1 "Baan Community" before we started this little project. See previous posts.

MSN is showing movement. As a matter of fact, it is the only SE where our position has changed (for the better).

I will post the new ranking report later today.

~Vamsi

3rd November 2005, 19:12

Is there some way to get some weightage to "Baan forum". That is what I am likely to search.

vahdani

3rd November 2005, 19:54

Can ranking be bought or at least solicited? Or put another way: How did SSA Global land the first Place for "Baan" Keyword? They are not that long in Baan-Business!

Or finally: Does "playing the Google Game" mean giving the Google Hotline a friendly call as well to explain our situation? :rolleyes:

Evert-Jan Bosch

4th November 2005, 10:08

Baan forum is listed at page 3, ranking 26.
Not that bad.

Francesco

5th November 2005, 05:01

http://www.admiralsolutions.biz/baanboard/bb051104.htm

Included 'baan forum', forgot to remove Altavista.

Highlights:
AOL - lost our 93 ranking for 'baan erp'...gone.
Google - no change
MSN - 'baan erp' up to 48 from 52, 'baan help' down to 67 from 62.
Yahoo! - 'baan forum' put us on the map.

Also, our pagerank is still at 3.

We're doing something wrong.

Here is the PR algorithm:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
where PR(A) is the PageRank of a page A
PR(T1) is the PageRank of a page T1
C(T1) is the number of outgoing links from the page T1
d is a damping factor in the range 0 < d < 1, usually set to 0.85

So really we can't build our own PR, because it is largely determined by the PR of the sites linking to US.

~Vamsi

5th November 2005, 18:05

So really we can't build our own PR, because it is largely determined by the PR of the sites linking to US.

We need a few big sites linking to us. I know that companies with high PageRank for their sites post on Baanboard to recruit people. Since Baanboard provides them a place to do that for free, could we request them to place a link on their websites?

Francesco

7th November 2005, 17:13

Accidently named them 1106. Oh well.
http://www.admiralsolutions.biz/baanboard/bb051106.htm

Highlights:
'baan erp' is doing good on Google. We jumped from 92 to 53. That's 4 pages!!

There is movement, but not as much as I had anticipated.

So far I found one major flaw in our little scheme. The sig-line link-back from the forums is pointless. All the forum pages have a PR of 0, so PR(T1) being zero they add exactly nothing to our score.

However, here is a thought. Any new page always starts off with a PR of 1. If we have 10 new pages, each with a PR of 1, with only a single outgoing link (to baanboard), then we should get an additional 8.5 points if the above algorithm is correct.
Sounds too easy.

~Vamsi

21st November 2005, 18:50

What is going on in the world of rankings?

Francesco

28th November 2005, 16:11

And I am guessing that by now my trial version has expired.

Any volunteers?

Francesco

29th November 2005, 21:35

But I am not sure where to go from here.

My Agent web Ranking has indeed expired, so somebody else needs to pick up that ball.

I scrubbed the first 20 pages of Google for 'baan' and did not find us. Ironically my wikipedia entry (including the link to us) made it to page 2.

For 'baan forum' (Vamsi's favorit), we now rank NUMBER TWO!!! (up from 30 on 11/6).
This is a great accomplishment, only overshadowed by the fact that baanfans holds the #1 seat.

We're still #1 on 'baan community'.

We dropped a few spaces for 'baan erp' and are now on page 7.

For 'baan help' I could not find a result.

Yahoo! is still surprisingly unresponsive to our efforts. What is WRONG with those yahoos?

Despite all out bitching at Microsoft, MSN is our best friend.
#30 for 'baan' (up from 59)
#1 for 'baan community'
#23 for 'baan erp' (up from 53)
#3 for 'baan forum' (DOWN from 2, surpassed by baanfans!!)
N/A for 'baan help' (formerly 63) I am guessing I just messed up here.

But, although we made progress, we are still far from our goal. Who has a bright idea?

~Vamsi

30th November 2005, 00:14

Who has a bright idea?

Not very bright. Lots of companies use Baanboard to recruit talent. Is there some way we could make them put a link to the posting on their own websites?

This is a tough one. How about creating buttons that can be placed on websites of Baan customers?

How does the link:www.baanboard.com in Google work. I show only four sites linking to us.

patvdv

30th November 2005, 00:23

This is a tough one. How about creating buttons that can be placed on websites of Baan customers?

Vamsi, that sounds like a good idea. Any creative wizards who could see a challenge in this? I can supply baanboard logo's and other assistance if required.

Regards,

Pat.

Francesco

30th November 2005, 23:59

I finally figured it out.
link:www.baanboard.com is the only correct method and yes, only 4 google-acknowledged sites link to us.

I only now noticed that links: www.baanboard.com, which I used before, is not a command, but rather searches for the terms 'links' and 'www.baanboard.com'

Badabing, badabang, badaboom. There lies our problem. It also means that we can boost our pagerank with just a few registered sites linking back to us.
Alternatively, we can link to sites that have references to baanboard but are currently not spidered themselves.

With a few PR points added, this thing is gonna fly.

Francesco

18th December 2005, 20:02

www.linkvault.com

csecgn

19th December 2005, 00:21

Maybe a good news for the project: I've just found a link to Baanbord.com on the german wikipedia on the topic "baan". And this page is on the first page if you google for "baan".

(I've didn't insert the link, I've just found it. But for my opinion it has been a good idea)

Regards
csecgn

klixy23

3rd February 2006, 09:01

Is it true that the google page rank for http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/index.php is 3?

Francesco

3rd February 2006, 17:02

Although we managed to boost our ranking for 'baan forum' and 'baan community', our page rank is still stuck on 3 and I for one believe that this is the main reason for the lack of progress in our 'baan' ranking.

It's a case of Google messing up, because there is no doubt that baanboard is very relevant to the term and this is not depicted in our page rank.

I recently heard that changes in page rank can still take months to occur, so I have a little hope left. There is a way to go to Google's main servers and see if there are planned changes to your pagerank, but I forgot how to do this.

I've been rather tied-up in other things lately and from what I hear, so is Google :D

~Vamsi

25th June 2007, 20:18

Check the standings on Google:
Search for baan forum, lists us at #1
Search for baan, lists us at #5

Can we call this project a success?

Francesco

27th June 2007, 11:40

I'm glad somebody is still paying attention.

As I changed my hemisphere since the beginning of this game I am now in the position to check our ranking on a different Google server.

Traditionally 'baan' has been a tough search on the Belgian/Dutch google because baan in dutch means job and therefore we have to compete with one million jobseekers, tempagents and headhunters.

For 'baan forum' we rank #2, right after a big employment forum. Not bad, not bad at all.
Baanfans comes in at #4. Muhahaha! In your FACE!

For just 'baan' we are not mentioned on the first 4 pages. :mad:

'baan erp' puts us in position #6. The competition is nowhere in sight.

It is amazing but after all this time we actually shifted in the right direction.

Maybe I put the bar a little high when I made the #2 position our goal for 'baan'.
As you mentioned previously, 'baan forum' is the correct search term.

In that case, the project is indeed a success and somehow we met the goal.
Can we be sure that it was through the efforts we made over a year ago? Did Google change its algorithm during that time?
For that matter, how are we doing on Page Rank? (I don't do Google bars anymore).