Search engine optimization (SEO) for digital repositories

Surveys conducted by the University of Utah across numerous libraries and archives have revealed a disturbing reality: the number of digital objects successfully harvested and indexed by search engines from library digital repositories is abysmally low. The use of the scholarly and lay content in these databases is predicated on visibility in Internet search engines, and libraries have spent millions over the past decade creating repositories whose objects are being harvested and indexed only minimally. The reasons for the poor showings in Internet search engines are complex, and are both technical and administrative. The problem lies less with the search engines than with the content they have to work with. Institutional repositories face added challenges as Google Scholar inclusion guidelines differ from GoogleÆs main index. Improvements to the way the content is presented can help search engines parse, organize, and serve more relevant results to researchers and other users. This presentation will report findings and some solutions associated with this ongoing research.