A Brief History of www.mtnmath.com

This web site focuses on facts and speculation on, physics, mathematics and philosophy. It gets substantial traffic for a one person site on such topics. In 2008, according to an Urchin report, there were over 67,000 session referrals from domains with "google" in their name. (There were over 277,000 sessions. but this figure is inflated by robots.)

I believe the site was started sometime in 1997 (I owned the domain name for a few years before that). I started it as a forum for my ideas, The history of how the site became popular goes back further. In 1994 I was concerned about a FAQ on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which was full of errors. I complained to the FAQ approval group and was told my only recourse was to create a competing FAQ. I edited and wrote most of the "Measurement in quantum mechanics FAQ" and posted it every month to appropriate news groups. When I started this site I posted the FAQ on it. Some time later I did a Google search on "quantum mechanics" and was astounded to find that my FAQ was the first hit. I believe it remained at the top of Google's ranking for a year or more. Eventually a site sponsored by the National Science Foundation on "visual quantum mechanics" and other sites took over first place.

In 1995 I completed the first draft of a book, Einstein's Revenge. Later I posted it in both PDF and HTML formats on this site. The HTML format was generated by LaTeX2HTML which produces a separate web page for every section and subsection. This makes many short pages which are ranked higher by Google than longer pages with material unrelated to the search. There are two subsequent drafts of my book titled What is and what will be: integrating spirituality and science posted on the site. I keep the old drafts to avoid breaking links from other sites, but I added a link to the current version at the top of each page. Starting with the second draft I began interspersing nature photographs in the pages as visual poetry. (With my first digital camera I took many pictures.) The last two drafts and the published book come in plain text and illustrated versions. No doubt some page views and downloads are more for the pictures than the text.

I self published the book at Lulu.com in 2006 and subsequently created 3 videos to promote the book by linking to the the web site using the more easily remembered domain name whatWillBe.com. Mathematical Infinity and Human Destiny is the most popular video with over 25,000 page views in 2008.

In my experience the best way to improve Google rankings is to create material that is valuable to Google users and organize that material so relevant information is easy to access. Keep pages short and focused.