The SEO State of the Union: How 35 VIVO and Profiles sites show up on search engines — and what we can do to make research networking platforms more discoverable to real users ChatterjeeAnrivan TurnerBrian 2015 Research networking platforms vary substantially in terms of their discoverability via search engines like Google – the front door to the majority of online resources for many researchers. For example, UCSF Profiles receives about 82% of its traffic through search engines (about 90,000 visits per month); another comparable site receives 87% of its traffic from search engines. Other research networking platforms, however, appear to be largely invisible to search engines.<br><br>UCSF has been performing the first large scale study of search engine optimization (SEO) in the research networking space, assessing the effectiveness of 35 different public research networking implementations in making their people-related data findable to Internet searchers. These include systems built on VIVO, Profiles RNS, and SciVal Experts, as well as home-grown systems, leveraging the work of the R2R initiative.<br><br>We will present on our findings, including an overview of how different implementations and platforms rate in terms of search engine discoverability, stratifying by the size of deployment, platform<br><br>These findings will help us offer an improved set of search engine optimization best practices, informed by real-world data on which approaches are most likely to succeed in the real world. We will leave the audience with an updated guide on search engine optimization for research networking.