1/16/07

Weblist Suggestion (Thanks GenghisTheHun!)

Guys, the very polite tradition that many RIA'ers have about giving additional attribution to new item suggester's using parentheses is actually a bad idea.

For example, let's say GTH suggests adding "Dingoes" to a list of "Dangerous Animals to Babies." The list owner may be tempted to add the new item to his/her list like this, in order to thank GTH for the suggestion:

Animals Dangerous to Babies

1) Dingoes (Thanks GenghisTheHun!)
2) Snakes
3) Alligators
etc.

Here's the problem with this - RateItAll relies on Google for a lot of its traffic. The newly added page about dingoes has excellent potential to attract Google traffic for searches like:

"dingoes baby danger"
"are dingoes dangerous to babies"
"dingoes baby animal danger"
etc.

However, I can guarantee you that NOBODY, with the possible exception of GTH himself, is searching for:

"Dingoes Babies Thanks GenghisTheHun
"Thanks GenghisTheHun Baby Danger Dingoes"
etc.

So unwittingly, by giving credit to GTH via parentheses in the new item suggestion, the list owner is actually putting obstacles up to people who might be looking for the dingo page.

This hurts the list owner by hiding his list from folks who might want to rate things, it hurts GTH by preventing new users from visiting the page he added (for which he gets ad sharing credit), and it hurts RIA.

Fortunately, RateItAll already tracks who submits what items to lists, and gives public attribution to the submitter on the item page in a way that won't mess up search traffic.

So please... let's change this polite, but damaging custom of adding a (Thanks!) after the item name on a weblist suggestion.

1 comment:

  1. that's a good point... if folks can help me spread the word about the blog, that would be greatly appreciated. also, i'm looking into how i might put blog headlines on the ria home page...

    ReplyDelete

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