29.05.2006: Link, or piss off...?:Ron, IU

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Here's a question thats really been bothering me.

Given what IrishUsnigned is all about, and our ideals, and philosophy behind the idea of communities (such as grass roots Irish musicians) helping each other out, is it too much to expect bands to at least link back to us?

For thise who don;t know, search-engine rankings are partly based on keywords but also on the number of links in from other sites. If we have 440+ Artists on the site, and at least 300 of them have active websites, you'd expect that many links back, not including the ones on allsorts of other sites.

We have no more than 350 links into IrishUnsigned. From a quick scan of them, probably half are from organisations, link directories and articles, most of which we have done ourselves.

We've always been insistent that being a 'member' of IrishUnsigned should not impose any requirements on the Artists or Organisations. Sure, it means all sorts of tat can get on the system, so long as they fill in the forms correctly, but it also means a load of pisstakers do so.

IU in the past was one of the first ten returns on Google when searching the string "New Irish music". NOw it is a LONG way down. I skimmed through the first 100 returns and it wasn;t there. Bizarrely, we're 7th when searching the string "Irish accednt", bacuse of the IU tagline 'Real music with an Irish accent'.

maybe I should have set up an linguistics site instead?

Questions: would it be fair to tell Artists, either those on the site or those who join up, that they will be removed or otherwise penalised if they don;t at least make that little effort? In other words, should IU abandon it's main principle so that we can increase the exposure of the site, and therefore the exposure of all the Artists on it?

Reply by email or on the IU MySpace group (see the link at the bottom infobar of this site)

Ron, IU

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