[EuroPython] Banners and Google

[Stefano Masini]

Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote:

> it is possible to add the links on the front-page and hide them with 
> some CSS markup which won't make any difference for robots.

Yes, that is surely a good idea. It looks like a good solution.
Let's just make sure that the html contains both the links and the 
payoffs, so that the robots will be able to index properly.
Something like:

<div class="invisible">
   <a href="www.site.com">Site, doing bla bla</a>
   <a href="www.company.com">Company, the best in bla bla</a>
   <a href="www.mywebsite.com">My web site, how cool I am</a>
</div>

> But when it comes to humans, having links at the bottom of a page all 
> gathered in a same area is not as good an idea as for robots. I think 
> that I totally ignored the links on EP 2004 because I had no reason to 
> scroll down the page. Had the image ads been shown individually at 
> different places on the site I probably would have noticed them.

I agree.
The look of EP 2005 website is *a lot* better.

> So I can agree that linking from a 8/10 ranking page is important -- it 
> means more incoming traffic -- at least if the visitors actually see the 
> links. Then maybe a page that does not get ranked at google will 
> generate a lot of traffic inside the site, so it is a matter of balance.

Having a link to website B from a highly ranked website A is a good 
thing not only because all the many visitors of A will see the link to 
B, but mainly because Google will decide that B is important too.
It's the way Google works. If a highly ranked web page links to 
another page, then the ranking of the linked page will increase.
And being highly ranked is good because when you search something on 
Google, the highest ranked pages are shown earlier.
That's why when you search "python europe" you get europython.org as 
the first result: because it's an impressive rank 8/10 (associated of 
course with the keywords "python" and "europe"). If it was a 4/10 it 
would have probably been on the second page...

> Where can you see the rank of a page/site on Google?

There are browser plugins that query google for ranking and show it to 
you. The protocol is not documented, and Google itself distributes a 
plugin for Internet Explorer. But some folks reverse engineered the 
protocol and wrote a plugin for Firefox.

Internet Explorer: Google Toolbar, http://toolbar.google.com/

Mozilla Firefox Extension: Search Status v1.2
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows&numpg=10&id=321