Divorce (Wikivorce) - Website Evaluation
July 28th, 2007 by Shiva
Wikivorce (Divorce) is not a replacement for solicitors. Wikivorce is a place you can learn, share and make friends. It is a community of people going through divorce (or recently divorced) who support each other during a very challenging stage in their lives.
Question:
Hi,
Wikivorce is a very popular new site, 30 people register per day, about 3000 page views per day and growing fast.
I appear in natural google/msn/yahoo search, but only really for by site name plus some unlikely niche terms like “divorce calculator forum blogs†and page rank remains stuck at 0.
any suggestions gratefully received.
ian
Suggestions:
Hi Ian,
You have a great site going. These are all few things that I noted that you would like to change it.
1. The meta keywords and descriptions for the site is not effective, you might want to change that.
2. The main site forwards to another url which is http://www.wikivorce.com/joomla/, there are two disadvantages here, one thing is the forward activity and then the second is that the main site is in a subfolder. You can change so that your site is in the main site itself, the only drawback will be that already indexed files in search engines will get affected, but on a long run I would suggest that, until otherwise you have plans to do something on the main url itself.
3. The style css can be kept in a file and referred (included) in pages rather than putting that in the file itself.
4. Some of the url’s doesn’t have the meta description itself. For example: http://www.wikivorce.com/joomla/Divorce-Forum/Child-Support-Contact/
5. Also you can create subdomains such as http://divorceforum.wikivorce.com and then point it to the folder.
6. I understand that you are using Joomla software for your content management system. But your site folder doesn’t need to have the subfolder to be called as joomla.
7. I would recommend you to talk with webmaster and to check on the IIS settings on main url, creating sub-domains, adding appropriate keywords and meta descriptions.
Hope this helps, good luck for your site!!
Cheers,
Shiva
Shiva,
Thank you so much for the tips.
Strangely enough I was working on the meta tags yesterday and for the first time managed to get the tag set correctly on all pages (including components). Also I’m using an new SEF (sh404SEF) and am getting close to having SEF URLs on all pages. However, I have not yet found a way to get Meta descriptions on all pages. JoomSEO does a good job to get the descriptions on standard content pages, but when using main components (such as forum or blogging component) the description is not populated. I may have to do some custom coding here.
I have always wondered what were the disadvantages of having the site in a sub-folder called joomla and re-directing to it. I plan in a few weeks to migrate to a new UK based server (so that I can get in Google UK search!) so I shall move site out of subfolder at that point.
What is the advantage of creating sub-domains ?
like forum.wikivorce.com
rather than just: wikivorce.com/forum
Thanks again
ian
Hi Ian,
You are welcome. There are few advantages in using subdomain over subfolder.
1) Easy to remember for users. (as most popular sites such as google, live, yahoo have sub-domains for their major tools/mail/products.
2) The folder structure, if it is in a subdomain you can point that to a folder that resides outsite your main site. You can treat your sub-domain as equal to a new domain. Whereas if you create the sub-folder - the subfolder had to exist inside the main site folder.
For example: http://www.wikivorce.com points to c:\webhost\youraccount\wikivorce then your wikivorce.com/forum will point to c:\webhost\youraccount\wikivorce\forum. Whereas, if you keep it in a subdomain - you can point that to a c:\webhost\youraccount\someotherfolder
3) Easy to organize and maintain.
4) Some search engine’s give weightage to subdomain over subfolder.
Hope this helps,
Shiva