One central motivation pushing current vozmob users to write their stories, they tell us, is their desire to change the image of day laborers, and of immigrants in general. This was starkly brought home when, during one of the vozmob Tuesday night workshops, they googled “day laborer” and discovered that the first search result was a hate site listed with the following description: “Day Laborers: Some of the most violent murderers, rapists, and child molesters, are illegal aliens who work as day laborers.” By publishing true stories about their daily lives, vozmober@s dream they might some day knock down that top search result.
Are we having any effect, by that standard? There are signs that we might. For example, following vozmob’s coverage of the household workers national conference last November in Oakland, CA, a google search for “trabajadoras de casa” done on January 26 2010 returns vozmob in 6th position (that’s on the French google.fr site. On the U.S. google.com, vozmob is the 8th result). When searching for “jornalero”, vozmob is now the 33rd result. And searching for “day laborer”, vozmob now comes up #188 – still too far down the list to make a dent in the top rank of hateful daylaborers.org, but visible nonetheless.
As we prepare to re-design the vozmob.net site, broaden the participant base, and publicize the site more widely in the coming months, this seems a good time to start tracking our search rank more systematically. Using rank checker, a firefox extension, I have set up a weekly rank search on google, yahoo, and live for the following keywords (suggestions for additions are welcome):
- jornalero
- jornaleros
- day laborer
- day laborers
- trabajadoras de casa
- household workers
- immigration
- inmigracion
Below are today’s results. Let’s see how this evolves.
| Keyword | Google position | URL | Yahoo position | URL | Live position | URL |
| jornalero | 33 | vozmob.net/en/node/6074 | 7 | http://vozmob.net/es/node/6074 | 78 | http://vozmob.net/es/node/4885 |
| jornaleros | 73 | vozmob.net/es/node/6114 | 55 | http://vozmob.net/en/node/5961 | – | |
| day laborer | 188 | vozmob.net/es/aggregator/sources/3 | – | – | ||
| day laborers | – | 116 | http://vozmob.net/es/aggregator/sources/3 | – | ||
| trabajadoras de casa | 8 | vozmob.net/es/node/5428 | 14 | http://vozmob.net/household | 36 | http://vozmob.net/es/node/5426 |
| household workers | – | – | – | |||
| immigration | – | – | – | |||
| inmigracion | – | – | – |
Putting keywords in the URL is a big part of SEO (search engine optimization). This can be done manually or automatically with a module like PathAuto.
vozmob.net/en/node/6074
could be vozmob.net/content/jornalero-habla-de-h1n1
vozmob.net/es/node/5428 could be vozmob.net/content/trabajadoras-de-casa-en-accion
Sounds like a good idea. I’ve made it an issue at http://dev.vozmob.net/issues/430. Can you put in an estimated time to do this, so we can prioritize in the development queue?
I’ve been meaning to learn how to use github anyway. Testing it out with this issue. I think I have it all configured correctly, and have added pathauto module to my fork of vozmob, now just waiting for mfb to approve my pull request. Then we can configure PathAuto for SEO.