I’ve had a hard time over the last month with optimizing widgetstandards.org for Google. The main page shows up in the top 15 results for “widget standards” one day then the next it’s around a page rank of 55 or so. The site wasn’t even indexed for about a month, which was obviously frustrating. Now let me say three things before I continue: first, I have done SEO for many PHP based websites and I’ve never had a problem like this before with page rank; second, this is my first MediaWiki site; and third, widgetstandards.org is ranked first in Yahoo for “widget standards” - but of course Yahoo is not Google as we all know.

I’m going to give it some more time, and maybe it will all work out, but I have to say that normal Google optimization procedures do not seem to be enough for MediaWiki installations. I’ve visited a number of forums, and many other sites have had the same problems, and I’ve made adjustments based on their advice - time will tell if they work well or not. I like MediaWiki and I’m going to stick with it for the site, but for anyone else out there thinking of installing a public wiki, be aware that MediaWiki SEO for Google is simply hard.