Alrighty.

I took the top 10 landing pages of people coming from google and did a quick
google check with the 'link:' operator to find...that none of them were
linked elsewhere.

I know that the 'link:' operator can be a little finicky, so I've enabled
google webmaster tools. I'll check back in a day or two once it's had time
to recrawl and show me the inbound links...but I have a feeling that this
result will not change much.

The second most popular landing page is actually a LCSH subject search. I
highly doubt that anyone is linking to a listing of items that we have filed
under Sex customs -- India, but it is 5th hit when people google for 'india
sexuality customs'. (Which is the number one keyword search that gets people
to us, minus "jhu library catalog" and its permutations).

Also, our top 10 landing pages are mostly books or journals with lengthy
titles. Looking through the search keywords, people are not just typing one
or two words and ending up at our catalog. People are typing in
'international journal of obesity and related metabolic disorders' and
getting us as the 4th hit.  Seems like the more specific people are in their
searching (I'm seeing a lot of full, lengthy-titled keyword searches that
include the author's name), the more likely they are to end up at our
catalog.

-Sean


On 2/24/12 2:33 PM, "Binkley, Peter" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> That example "gil scott heron circle of stone" returns a JHU record as
> the first hit, but the item is his thesis and the url is found in the
> Wikipedia article on Gil Scott-Heron, so it has a lot of pagerank
> independently of the catalogue. I'm just curious: can you control for
> that kind of externally-prominent link in your 59% number - say by
> taking the top x items that people hit from Google and searching their
> urls in Google to see if anyone else is linking to them? It would be
> interesting to know how much of that 59% is due to the richness and
> well-linkedness of JHU's special collections rather than to the
> prominence Google is giving to the catalogue.
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Peter Binkley
> Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian
> Information Technology Services
> [log in to unmask]
> 
> 4-30 Cameron Library
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton, Alberta
> Canada T6G 2J8
> 
> phone 780-492-3743
> fax 780-492-9243
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Sean Hannan
> Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 11:37 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Local catalog records and Google, Bing, Yahoo!
> 
> Our Blacklight-powered catalog (https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/) comes
> up
> a lot in google search results (try gil scott heron circle of stone).
> 
> Some numbers:
> 
> 59% of our total catalog traffic comes from google searches
> 0.04% of our total catalog traffic comes from yahoo searches
> 0.03% of our total catalog traffic comes from bing searches
> 
> For context, 32.96% of our total catalog traffic is direct traffic and
> referrals from all of the library websites combined.
> 
> Anecdotally, it would appear that bing (and bing-using yahoo) seem to
> drastically play down catalog records in their results. We're not doing
> anything to favor a particular search engine; we have a completely open
> robots.txt file.
> 
> Google regularly indexes our catalog. Every couple days or so. I haven't
> checked in awhile.
> 
> We're not doing any fancy SEO here (though, I'd like to implement some
> of
> the microdata stuff).  It's just a function of how the site works. We
> link a
> lot of our catalog results to further searches (clicking on an author
> name
> takes you to an author search with that name, etc).  Google *loves* that
> type of intertextual website linking (see also: Wikipedia). We also have
> stable URLs. Search URLs will always return searches with those
> parameters,
> item URLs are based on an ID that does not change.
> 
> All of that good stuff doesn't help us with bing, though. ...But I'm not
> really concerned with remedying that, right this moment.
> 
> -Sean
> 
> On 2/23/12 12:37 PM, "[log in to unmask]"
> <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> 
>> First of all, I'm going to say I know little in this area. I've done
> some
>> preliminary research about search indexing (Google's) and investigated
> a
>> few OPAC robot.txt files. Now to my questions:
>> 
>>    - Can someone explain to me or point me to research as to why local
>>    library catalog records do not show up in Google, Bing, or Yahoo!
> search
>>    results?
>>    - Is there a general prohibition by libraries for search engines to
>>    crawl their public records?
>>    - Do the search engines not index these records actively?
>>    - Is it a matter of SEO/promoted results?
>>    - Is it because some systems don't mint URLs for each record?
>> 
>> I haven't seen a lot of discussion about this recently and I know
> Jason
>> Ranallo has done a lot of work in this area and gave a great talk at
>> code4lib Seattle on microdata/Schema.org, so I figured this could be
> part
>> of that continuing conversation.
>> 
>> I look forward to being educated by you all,
>> 
>> Tod