[Cyp-IMC-turkce] our homepage, searchability, and our archives

[Petros Evdokas]

Merhaba, Yeia sas, and Hello
Friends,

A few notes of general interested related to our shared homepage
http://Cyprus.IndyMedia.org

Some developments have occured in the way that the major search engines 
(google, yahoo, msn) handle their visitors requests, and they way they 
deal with what used to be their archived and cached material.
{The Cache is a special type of computer memory that operates at very 
high speed. It is used to place, hide, or store frequently used 
information locally for quick retrieval.}

These changes in the way search engines operate combine unfavourably 
with the unfortunate history of our own Cyprus IndyMedia archives, the 
interruptions in Open Publishing, our moving from one server to another 
and the inconsistent usage of domain names due to miscommunication with 
some of our Western imc colleagues in the past.

What this means for us is that our material is not propagating around 
the internet with as much speed and volume as it used to be. Often in 
the past, if one did a search with the term Cyprus and any other term, 
Cyprus IndyMedia would come up in the first page of results. This gave a 
lot of exposure to our work. Very often, our articles came up in a 
higher rank than items produced by Governments and Corporations. It's 
not happening any more.

We can fix it.

One way to do it is to change our homepage. A minimal way of changing it 
would just add some material to the bottom of the page (only visible if 
a visitor scrolls down by one or two screen heights). That material 
would be innocuous in terms of presentation, but it would improve our 
status with the major search engines.

There are other ways of improving our search engine status as well, like 
creating pages which are only for being read by the machinery of search 
engines (those machines are called "spiders".)

Plus a few more.

I can do all of them, but it will take some time.

The most immediate would be re-doing our homepage, and this would 
require your feedback, so that we can generate a consensus between all 
three of our language branches.

If you like, when I have the opportunity I'll create a sample page as a 
proposal, and show it to you. If we all approve it, or change it so that 
it can be acceptable to all of us, we can then employ it as our homepage.

If these steps are ok with you all, I'll try to have the proposed page 
ready by Mayday.

Thanks,
Petros
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