SEO

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SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization which refers to the practice and results of publishing pages and permalinks on the web in order to rank better (earlier/higher) in web search engine results. In practice IndieWeb sites seem to do better than silos at search engine results.

How to

2022-02-09 Ton Zijlstra: 1 Simple SEO Step To Put Your Site In The Web’s Top Percentile

Anecdotal experience of what does better, in rough order:

IndieWeb sites with permalinks with slugs of search terms
HTML over equivalent PDF content
Silos with permalinks with slugs of search terms
IndieWeb sites with permalinks without slugs
Other silo results with slugs of search terms (e.g. silo wikis)

IndieWeb Examples

Notable examples of search terms or phrases showing indieweb results first or in some other highlighted manner such as an explicit preview.

Donald McIntosh

Donald McIntosh's journal of The French Divide beats their official Facebook page, as of 2017-12-30.

Mobile search result from Donald:

Verified by Tantek Çelik on desktop:

Aaron Parecki

(stub)

https://w7apk.com/baofeng beats the PDF version of the same information on another site.

IndieWeb Wiki

The IndieWeb Wiki itself shows up frequently in top search results. Interesting examples:

"NASCAR problem" is not only the first result in Google (as of 2017-11-15), but shown in a preview box with abbreviated text from the page and a screenshot (almost like an encyclopedic presentation)

Tantek

Tantek Çelik's Twitter account showed up for capjamesg in the top position for the query "t" on desktop and the second-from-top position for "t" on mobile on the Google search engine.

Google displayed Tantek Çelik's permalinks back to his original posts. This shows that your domain could show up in Twitter posts that appear on Google, which gives additional incentive to add original post permalinks to your POSSE Tweets.

Desktop

Mobile

Other Wikis

Other wikis used by folks in the community

E.g. searching for "emailefail"

Articles

2009-10-12 Derek Powazek: Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists (archived)
- Update 1: 2009-10-13 Derek Powazek: SEO FAQ (archived)
- Update 2: 2009-10-19 Derek Powazek: The Green Hair Theory (archived)
2023-11-08 Chris Coyier: Everything about SEO is obnoxious (archived): “But the main reason for my ire is that it just plain wrecks the internet.”
2023-11-28 Xe Iaso: The birth & death of search engine optimization (archived).
- Written inspired by a thread on X by Jake Ward (2023-11-24). Read on Thread Reader. (archived.)
- The basic idea is that you use generative AI to systematically churn out articles about a given topic and then use A/B testing to eliminate the ones that don't "work" on search engines in favor of the ones that do. This is a way to automate the process of creating content farms.
- Even better, there's goddamn startups around the idea of making tools for SEO people to automate this. Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to try having it write an article titled "How to cheat at SERP SEO using OpenAI to do all the work for you". I've uploaded it here in case you want to see what kind of garbage output it gets.
- The automatically generated article How to cheat at SERP SEO using OpenAI to do all the work for you (archived).

Brainstorming

Publish Good Content At Simple Permalinks

Some of the oldest "simple" advice on SEO for independent websites essentially recommends:

publish well-written relevant blog posts on a topic
use well designed permalinks with slugs mentioning key topics

If you do that, people will appreciate your blog posts, and are more likely to want to share them with others, informally (e.g. in messages), and publicly, on their own blogs or social media, which search engines will notice and use as an indicator.

Keeping your permalinks short and readable (less than 70 characters, no random hex digits / UUIDs etc.) make them easier for folks to share, and more likely that people receiving / seeing them will click on them.