Notes

• have grown traffic roughly 20-fold since first launch - have learned what can do and what not to do. No magic -- all the pieces work together

• http://profiles.ucsf.edu launched in October 2010 with lots of publicity -- started at 5,000 hits a month but has grown to 100K hits/month

• 37% CA

• 30% other USA

• 83% from search engines

• Growth Hacking 101

• measure baselines with analytics -- “Web Analytics 2.0” by Kaushik

• put people pages front and center

• register with Google Webmaster Tools

• segment on-campus vs. off-campus traffic

• 15% new visitors last month overall, but is 72% of on-campus users while only 20% of outside users

• ignore your home page -- users don’t land there -- 2.1% of Profiles users start on the home page, and 98% totally avoid the home page

• and only 21% of 2+ minute users start on the home page

• growth of home page views is pretty static while the rest of the traffic is growing

• people type a name into Google and want to go to the person’s profile

• so have cleaned up those profile pages

• more inviting, more data fields, bigger photos, etc -- look at good examples

• get indexed -- make sure search engines can see it

• have a dynamic site map of all the pages on your site -- check with Google webmaster tools

• make sure you’re not blocking via robots.txt (www.robotstxt.org)

• tweak URLs and page snippets -- search results show title, URL, and snippet

• customize the URL to make it more appealing -- e.g., profiles.ucsf.edu/eric.meeks

• make the snippet more readable -- not random pieces of text

• make the <title> on profile pages so it’s short and globally unique

• the <meta name=”description”> something like “Jane Doe’s profile, publications, research topics, and co-authors

• with Schema.org can add in a line of professional metadata

• follow instructions

• use google.com/webmasters/richsnippets

• make pretty URLs -- see a lot of researchers putting that URL in their email signature -- feels more personal

• and the pretty URL should be the “real” URL, not just a redirect

• Get inbound links -- self-reinforcing

• doing a lot with campus news department so every news story mentioning a researcher includes a link to the profile

• and have the link in the directory

• get links to Profiles on departmental pages

• work with departments to give them a feed -- or just link by saying “view on UCSF Profiles”

• include links in narrative bios

• create APIs for people to use

• document them on a developer-centric website

• online discussion group

• outreach to campus groups

• ask for attribution via a link back to Profiles -- you save them time and money and they give you links

• over 2 dozen sites now using Profiles data and linking back

• media mentions also link to individual profiles (instead of what is often a pretty crappy lab page)

Questions

• Do some people/departments see as competition for their web space?

• Profiles had some buy-in but no top-down direction to use it -- work closely with departments

• sometimes makes the Profiles higher than the department page, but few of them measure

• helps to be giving them data, and data that is clean

• E.g., UCSF School of Pharmacy partnered with the Profiles team and re-used, and worked out editing in Profiles -- don’t have to push it on them

• Pretty URLs?

• VIVO has the URI vs. the display URL -- don’t want to use our URIs as links on the display pages since appears then to have 2 URLs for the same thing

• The logistics -- how to assign a pretty URL to two people with the same first and last name

• could have preferred URL

• Eric -- still have the numeric URIs in Profiles, same as VIVO

• do content negotiation to display the HTML page with the pretty URL

• the links within pages are linked by URI, not URL

• Profiles had a pretty URL /websites/profiles/name -- better to shorten

• have a strategy to avoid name collisions that does a good job -- if 2 Eric Meeks, one of whom has middle initial

• have shared that algorithm -- pretty easy to get uniqueness without having to deal with

• but is worth doing

• BU has taken the UCSF code and modified it but put it into practice

• Jim -- do you retire the pretty URL?

• Eric -- the same case can be made for persistent URLs as well as persistent URIs

• Anirvan -- a lot of people have built this capability into

• having 2 URLs pointing to the same content

• if look at the accept headers -- if wanting XML or JSON, gets the data; otherwise direct to the pretty URL

• if use “link rel=canonical” to the pretty URL on the ugly URI “page” -- in the header -- do view source and do a search for canonical

• if a robot has scraped a URL with a bunch of query arguments

• do you do this for grants, equipment, etc.?

• No -- people come to Profiles overwhelmingly for people

• Patrick -- Scholars@Duke has encountered some resistance to competition -- stronger in the humanities than in medical world, perhaps?

• Eric -- we’re biomedical and the Profiles system does a good job for people. Resistance got smaller especially when offered background

• But had been other systems at other schools that used the word “profiles” so is a more confusing

• To be a successful research networking tool have to be a good website, and isn’t easy to do

• Duke has taken an aggressive approach with the widgets, but don’t underestimate how important it is to make a successful website to be a successful tool

• Jim -- did this presentation at an IFest and we haven’t done a lot yet -- thanks for helping to raise our vision up

• Anirvan -- worked in eCommerce and was excellent training

• Jim -- Nate Prewitt implemented microformats at the Hackathon

• Anirvan -- will the descriptions change? A short, one-line item

• Will be happy to share the slides via SlideShare

• Paul -- do you have before and after stats on the use of Schema.org tags?

• Anirvan -- have general stats; added Schema.org tags in late 2011 -- easy, and if Google is telling us to do it we should do it since they represent 82% of our traffic