Proposal for rabbit-semi from EmbeddedRelated.com

Members of rabbit-semi,

I hold the title of rabbit-semi-owner, a title passed to me long ago by the original creator of the group.  I was recently contacted by Stephane Boucher or EmbeddedRelated.com.  He was asking me to make some changes to the group so his site could become the official public archive for the rabbit-semi Yahoo Group.

I feel like this should be a decision made by the people in the group, so I asked Stephane to write an email I could send to everyone to gauge their opinion.

Please reply to me directly, or on-list if you'd like to discuss it openly.  If there's enough support for Stephane's proposal, I may set up a poll in the group so everyone can vote.

Thanks.

-Tom

Hi Tom,

Stephane Boucher here, publisher of EmbeddedRelated.com.

As you might already know there is an aggregator on the site that brings together the archives of several of the best embedded systems related discussion groups out there, and rabbit-semi is one of the groups that is aggregated.

The reason why I am contacting you today is to suggest two modifications to the group settings.  I know this is a bold request, but please bear with me.

Basically, the two changes that I would like you to consider doing are as follow:

1- Make the archives of the group available to the group members only, as opposed to "Anyone".
2- Update the "Related Link" of the group (under Management->Description
& Appearance) to the archives on EmbeddedRelated:http://www.embeddedrelated.com/groups/rabbit-semi/1.php

These 2 changes would have a very minimal impact on the members of the group, but they would likely have a positive impact on EmbeddedRelated.com.

Lately, the site has been hit by several changes in Google's search algorithms.  From what I read, Google is becoming increasingly tough on replicated content, and from Google's point of view, I think it totally makes sense.  Google doesn't want to present links to the users that show twice the same content.

The problem is that the discussion groups aggregation system on EmbeddedRelated is all about replicated content. It offers to visitors a way to easily browse and search the archives of some of the best independent discussion groups, and it makes the archives easy to read by organizing the discussions by threads.

So long story short, if you were to make the archives of the rabbit-semi group only available to members of the group, Google would not see the archives of the group on EmbeddedRelated as duplicate content anymore, and chances are it would help the traffic to recover. 

My goal with EmbeddedRelated is to provide a great resource to the Embedded Systems community.  Please do not hesitate to ask questions if you are unsure about my intention, or if you want to learn more about me (my blog post at http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/157.php shows that I am not to be taken too seriously).  

Thanks a lot for your time Tom.

Stephane

p.s. I will soon launch a major cleanup of the archives in order to make the threads look better and easier to read.  Here’s an example of a Rabbit-Semi thread that has been cleaned up:
http://www.embeddedrelated.com/groups/rabbit-semi/show/41461.php