While this is old news, Kaimi Wenger at Times and Seasons has called for a Google link war for the term “Mormon Temple” so that those searching for “Mormon Temple” will find the Church’s site in the top 10 rather than just anti-Mormon junk. He’s asking people to provide links to www.ldstemple.com using the term Mormon Temple, as I’ve just done and have done on my list of links to the right. Great idea, Kaimi! I would also suggest that people providing links include the “title” parameter in the HTML code to add additional text, as I have done for the link above. In the HTML code after “a href = ….”, add something like title=”mormon temple, mormon temples, lds temple, Christian”.
For what it’s worth, if people search for the term “Mormon temples” or “temples Mormon”, one of my pages is in the top 10 on Google and is currently the first pro-LDS site listed. The page is http://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/FQ_masons.shtml – my Mormon Answers page about the Mormon Temple and Free Masonry, which includes a lot of information about the ancient nature of the restored LDS Temple. I’d appreciate any additional links to that page as well using terms like “Mormon temple” and “Mormon temples”.
I haven’t yet joined the link war because I thought that Google wouldn’t count a Blogger blog in its page rankings. Is this true?
It doesn’t count links in comments.
That being said, links have only a small portion to do with ranking. Content on the page linking and content on the page being linked to have much more to do with it. Since all the blogs participating in this fruitless effort are not temple oriented and the page to which they point has next to no content, this experiment will have negligible results.
But it won’t be fruitless if enough sites offer content-rich pages about the temple and links to and from other content-rich sites that present a faithful alternative to the anti’s.
I’m amazed at how many anti-LDS sites there are which pop up on google searches. I am so sorry for these people who have so much hatred in their hearts, how sad.
Google looks for meat, if we only give milk, what are we to expect? 😉 I think Google’s algorithms are very good but sometimes flawed. The minus keyword feature will help you find what you want. Purposefully manipulating search results to try to boost a page that doesn’t have a high amount of useful, informative content is one of the surest ways to get that page to be even lower in the rankings. Be very careful what you ask for.
~Jeff, a “Mormon Gnostic”