search engine indexing
3 votes c/dokk Posted by zPlus — 3 votes, 3 comments — Source

Anybody understands how google indexing work? Because I’ve noticed there’s an entire section of dokk that is not indexed, and I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with the website. Duckduckgo for comparison has a lot more indexed pages. The section is https://dokk.org/library, there are ~500 documents.

2 votes likho

I only had a cursory look into SEO.

What I got from it was to add meta tags at least for title, author, description, and keywords. Dating the document by when it was published or updated also helps.

Next, is to be linked from a site a crawler actively revisits. I’m sure this would mean linking yourself on user-generated content hubs such as Reddit or Twitter because there’s always going to be new pages to discover from there, but Fediverse instances seldom if ever get placed on search engine indexes.

2 votes zPlus

Thank you. “meta” do you mean literal HTML <meta> tags? Like <meta name="author">? I think these are supposed to refer to the HTML page itself rather than the content. For example “author” should mean who authored the HTML page, and not the author of the document that is displayed. If this makes sense.

2 votes likho

Yeah
<title>…</title>
<meta name="description" content="..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="..." />
<meta name="author" content="..." />

I started adding those tags to my web pages to imrpove search rankings.

Also if you are writing an article, a search engine assigns more “weight” to an article that uses the keyword in a paragraph than just the heading. Like if you did:

\<h1>Keyword: My cool project this and that</h1>
\<p>My cool project works and it’s awesome.</p>

Your page would get ranked under anothe page that did:

\<h1>Keyword: Something else entirely with a similar name\</h1>
\<p>Keyword is a this-and-that under a completely different topic.\</p>