Digital Commons is built to showcase your institution’s unique content to the world. As a hosted platform provider, we constantly monitor key indicators of discoverability to ensure that we are helping you to meet that goal. So when an inquiry was raised earlier this year about the discoverability of Digital Commons content in Google and Google Scholar, we felt it was important to understand and explore it. This led to a focused deep-dive into the data, and ultimately provided additional insights into the strength of Digital Commons’ discoverability and search engine optimization (SEO). In addition to the data below, please join our webinar “The Art & Science of Discoverability” on November 20 for a more in-depth discussion about our findings.
As you can see in the following two graphs, referrals to Digital Commons from Google and Google Scholar continue to grow at a steady rate.
And this trend keeps pace with the growth of Digital Commons repositories and content – both the number of Google and Google Scholar referrals per item also grow over the same time period. This indicates that Digital Commons SEO has continued to excel over the years.
If you’re wondering how this fits into general discoverability for Digital Commons content and what it means for your IR’s downloads, the picture is excellent here, too: the average number of downloads per object continues to remain steady over time.
What’s the big picture? The SEO and discoverability of your Digital Commons-hosted content is extremely strong and grows even stronger as your repository grows. If you would like to know how your specific IR is doing, please reach out to your Consultant at dc-support@bepress.com for an individualized discoverability report.
As always, we will continue our careful monitoring and focus on identifying new opportunities to improve SEO and discoverability to share with our Digital Commons community as a whole. To stay updated on this product development project, please continue to visit our blog where future posts will include more information on the difference between SEO and discoverability, a closer look at what bepress does in these areas, and suggestions for boosting your IR’s discoverability. We’ll also share more details during our upcoming webinar “The Art & Science of Discoverability” on November 20 – we hope to see you online with us!
