In order to make more open access data available on the web, this is what Harvard does for most of our silo catalogs of images, finding aids, geospatial data sets, and page turned digital objects (full text) - creates easily crawlable, meta-tagged index pages for each item.

The result is that for our finding aids (lots of text data exposed) we see about 3-4X as many referrals from search engines as we do searches in our native interface, and for images (brief metadata exposed) about a 30% bump for search engine referrals.


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Date:    Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:54:33 +0000
From:    Dave Caroline <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Local catalog records and Google, Bing, Yahoo!

To avoid sessions and other silliness just expose a search engine
friendly format without sessions.

As I dont have local visitors google traffic matters.

86.62% Search Traffic
  2.41% Referral Traffic
10.98% Direct Traffic

For my tiny corner on the web

Dave Caroline