Help me out :)

[Smmenen]

Just click this link.

http://pi314.ods.org:8001/quazex/Smmenen/index.html

I want my webpage to be higher on a list of searches that come up when I put my name in google. that way as I apply for jobs this winter, the first thing that they see isn't just a huge list of magic writings. I would appreciate that alot. Thank you.

Stephen Menendian

[Jacob Orlove]

Half your links are broken. :<

[Komatteru]

Dude, I think there's a way to write a script to hit a page likey every 5 seconds.  I'm not much of a CS type anymore, but I'm sure someone here would know how to do it.  If not, I'm sure I can get one of my CS type friends to do it.  I'd imagine it takes about 7 lines of code or so.

[Smmenen]

Half your links are broken. :<

There is no book or art link becuase I haven't added those pages.  I will update my essays page soon with my most recent essays but they are taking some time and I'm bogged down in other stuff at the moment.

Wow.  I'm not sure why my movie reviews went down.  I'll find out.

[Toad]

Add the meta tags I gave you. This is the most basic way to get your pages referrenced on web robots.

[Dr. Sylvan]

I don't think search engines can tell what your hit count is unless people selected it through them. So the real link you want people to go to is:

http://www.google.com/search?q=stephen+menendian&hl=en&lr=&start=30&sa=N

And then click on the "Contents Page" link. This will, however, even if thousands clicked through it, only make your #1 result non-Magic. The entire rest of those first three pages is pretty much your Magic writing and people mentioning your Magic writing. Your best bet is to not be ashamed of it---spin it as evidence that your writing is good enough to both get paid for it and have others understand and want to discuss it. If they act like it's a problem that you spend so much time on a "kid's game", you can emphasize (a) the other things you do, and (b) the adult community here. I don't think it'll be a problem.

[CF]

Frontpage-o-rific.

--
Chris

[Smmenen]

Arg.  What does that mean?

[Dr. Sylvan]

Arg.  What does that mean?

It means someone who right-clicks on your page and hits "View Source" is overwhelmed by the amount of unnecessary code that Frontpage editing adds to the relatively basic stuff you actually have on the page---you only need like a dozen different tags, if that. The "Welcome" isn't actually included until the last quarter of the page's code in your version.

I think CF actually just called you a n00b implicitly. :)

This is why I edit my stuff in Notepad. (See TMD Quotes link below.)

[Smmenen]

Well I modeled my front page based on Mr. Flaatens.

[TheFram]

Steve, I'm fairly certain that google rankings do not work in the way you have implied with your request. Google (I believe, having interviewed with them.) maintains a "graph" of the known internet in which vertices are web pages and edges are links between those web pages. To really oversimplify the algorithm, google records some sort of measure of the "quality" of each site based on a number of criteria,  and then measures the relative importance of each page returned from a search based on the number and importance of external links to that page (or incoming edges incident on that vertex, in the graph representation).

I find it unlikely, therefore, that your personal page will be made higher in google page rankings than links on SCG (which is a much more "important" site in the sense that it has far more external linking). To be sure, Google records the number of times that a people click on a link to a site from within their site, but as far as i know, that is a minimal criterion for determining a page's rank.

A good way to increase the rank of your personal site would be to ask people to link to it from other sites, or to include a link to it in your signature at the end of the articles. This technique, however, would likely not raise your personal page above those on SCG, due to the fact that SCG is an extremely established site with many external links pointing to it.

Also, I am fairly certain that making tons of posts on this forum that link to your page is not a solution either (I doubt it would be allowed anyway, but as an academic exercise...). There are several reasons for this.
1) Many message boards (this one not included), use the "no-index" meta-tag in their pages to tell google and similar engines not to index their pages.
2) These page's url's contain ?'s in them, which is a standard web way of indicating that they take dynamic input and are generated based on that input. (This standard can be easily circumvented by running servlets or similar programs over your server software.) Many search engines do not index pages with the ? character in the URL because they cannot reliably predict what the page will look like. This is why you will probably not find links directly to TMD posts on google, even if you search real hard.
In some circumstances, search engines will list pages with the ? character (google does). However, in order for these links to have importance, there would have to be external links to the pages that they are on. You see the cyclical nature of it, right?
3) It seems unlikely that TMD or similar boards would want to be indexed, so they will likely continue to use the ? and possibly add the "no-index" tag if they do not already have it.

[Jacob Orlove]

Keep in mind, though, that we're not talking about a google search in general. We're talking about one for "Stephen Menendian". If people link to his page with a link that contains his name, then that'll help boost his page's rank in a search for just his name. Obviously, his SCG articles will get highly ranked in random searches, but I know that my brandeis information, for example, ranks higher than my SCG articles.

Edit: but not, apparently, higher than the SCG thread Kevin started about me. Thanks a lot, Kevin. :p

[TheFram]

That much I agree with.

However, Jacob, your particular experience may have a little to do with the Brandeis domain. I know that some of the stuff I have on Princeton domain has almost no external links, but is listed on the first/second page of a search for my name. I think that I am simply coopting the clout of the domain of my school. So it seems as if it would require only minimal external linking to boost those pages because they already benefit from the "quality" of the host. Steve, it seems, does not have this luxury at the moment.

[Sylvester]

Basically, you want to have the link associated with your name on as many apgeas as possible. You also want the linkers to have good "clout" themselves. So, if you're not too scrupulous, you could edit Wikis, which tend to have good googlerank due to the large amount of (incestuous) linkage.