[Imc-uk-network] mirrored content on uk site = less search engine traffic for local sites

[yossarian]

Hi Chris,

Regarding your most recent changes to the Mir aggregation design,
referenced at:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-tech/2010-June/0602-0v.html

I think that the London collective will still be unwilling to have any
direct links at all from the newswire to content on indymedia.org.uk. 
As we've already said, our articles look terrible on indymedia.org.uk at
present because all of the media is missing.  There is also another
major problem, though.

I have been wondering about something, and I've just talked to our
search engine optimization guru here at work to confirm it.

If there are 2 copies of the same article on different websites, Google
(and other search engines) will take one of the copies as the "main"
article, and link to that copy in all search results.  Google
automatically decides which of the two copies it sees as more
authoritative.

As a concrete example, if I publish something on my blog, and the BBC
syndicates it, Google is going to assume that I copied something from
the BBC instead of the other way around.  Search result links will point
to the BBC.

This means that the indymedia.org.uk site with its ten year history and
millions of inbound links, will be seen by search engines as the "main"
source for any articles, not the originating site (London, Bristol,
Northern, or Notts).  Your design as it currently stands, containing
links from the newswire to content mirrored on the UK site, is very
likely to result in all Google searches pointing to the content on the
UK site, bypassing the originating site. 

In a worst case scenario for articles where people are getting to site
content by searching, this means that we could actually be looking at
less traffic for the local sites than if we simply hadn't participated
in the aggregator.

Other than that, it's an improvement on what exists.  Please go ahead
and deploy it as soon as possible once the links are out - every
collective that appears to have an opinion on the matter has said that
they want to have direct links only.

Yossarian