Mandel Center Website Goes Live
Now that the Mandel Center's website is finally live, I'm working on the slow process of bumping our search engine rankings. My feeling is that the newly reformulated semantic content will boost things nicely, but incoming links are still one of the biggest factors in boosting search engine ranks. We already have plenty of very well placed links coming in from our various constituency organizations, but many of the links point to old or outdated URLs that have gone away, or to old versions of the correct URL.
I've already worked things out with Tom Sterin to have a 404 handler for the bad URLs that will return a 301 (permanent) redirect to the correct new URL for 44 selected pages.
The bigger problem is the ambiguity of cwru.edu versus case.edu. Both domains are functionally identical for Joe Webuser, but Google and other search engines see http://www.cwru.edu/mandelcenter and http://www.case.edu/mandelcenter as two discrete competing websites with substantially similar (the same) content. Links going to cwru.edu do not help the rank of case.edu and vice-versa. Beyond that, from reading Google's docs it looks as though two or more domains or subdomains with substantially the same content will actually hurt the rank of all pages involved.
Most of our "good" incoming links go to the cwru.edu URL, so I've been contacting webmasters at a gazillion different organizations asking them to update their links to us. This is going to take forever. In the mean time I've come up with what is probably the most obvious answer to the problem in the short term. At this point, EVERY link on our front page is hard-coded with the full http://www.case.edu/mandelcenter/path/ rather than using a relative path that would let users surf on whatever domain they came in on. Now it should appear that the cwru.edu site has only one page and lots of high quality links to case.edu. At least that's the theory. I'll see how it pans out over the next few weeks.
Our baseline when searching for "nonprofit management" is slot #29 on Google and I want to see us in the top 5 to reflect our program's actual national ranking in the field.
Comments
All of the confusion between .cwru.edu and .case.edu with search engines can be fixed in moments. Just have the server do 301s from anything .cwru. to .case.
Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL understand 301s and appropriately reflect such in their search rankings. The 301s would effectively remove any of the .cwru. listings and the appropriate Google-Juice related to the .cwru. counterparts of .case. pages would be merged in with the .case. pages.
I'm well aware of this and I use this trick on my own site. I asked Tom about doing the same thing for Aurora, but he seemed to think there were much deeper consequences that had to be dealt with before they did something like that. I wonder if it's related to SSL certs, ERP, or some other fun^w nasty stuff like that.
I like the look. I think it is very important to have faces on websites like you've got on the front page. They really affect how people "feel" when they first view the site. Interestingly this is done in under 50ms.