Google ranking and knowledge sharing (updated)¶

Again something from Paul Allen. An article about google ranking. Google is very important in the way I search for information. It is the same for a lot of other people, as google is the #1 source of visitors to my site (not that it are that many visitors, but still). In the first four days of this month I got 28 visitors from other pages and 64 from google.

One thing from the article that is easy to check your own site with: how many pages from your site does google read? type site:vanrees.org into google (replace with your sitename). At the moment google reads some 789 pages from vanrees.org. I see that there are stale once in there, but still. Stabu only has 5 (the site is severely google de-optimised, they're working on improving it).

On knowledge sharing I've got a quote from the article: Secondly, because I like to share knowledge freely (the bible verse says, "freely ye have received, freely give") in the hope that I can help others. It makes me happy when others thank me for what I've shared with them.

Update: Just noticed Martin Fowler has something similar to say about sharing your knowledge. I went through similar thoughts in my time as an independent consultant. Some colleagues preferred to not talk too much about their best ideas, so that they could charge clients for using them. Others would freely pass on every tip they ran into. My number one mentor in my career was Jim Odell, who has always followed the philosophy of giving ideas away. I liked how things worked out for him and thus did much the same myself. It's very much the philosophy that Jerry Weinberg follows.

On this weblog I'm posting some things I notice and an occasional personal opinion about something. I've taken care to put most of my scientific papers online. But I can do more. Much more. It just isn't hard-wired yet to write things I learn or design down on this website. I'll do a brainstorm about it tomorrow.