WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results

Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by tannhaeuser on Monday June 05, 2017 @06:33PM (#14492873)

I don't know about Google search being as great and flawless as you're implying here. I run a website which is dedicated to one particular topic, and Google won't list it at all ("no more results after like 198 hits" of lots of outdated and superficial content), even though the site is registered via Google search console. On other topics, I get pointless "123000 matches in 0.23 ms" results. Not impressed at all; a naive keyword count as rank criterion would do better

You can check it out yourself by searching for "SGML" and compare my site http://sgmljs.net/docs/sgmlrefman.html.

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Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by daddyo on Monday June 05, 2017 @07:22PM (#14493225)

- There are other websites with way more authority talking about SGML. (Like the W3C website).

- You have no/little sites or forums linking to your content.

- Your page titles are uninformative. Biggest offender is probably the homepage, with a page title of "index". But even for your reference page, it it is just "Syntax Reference" (way too general), and Google actually uses your page headings to repair this to "SGML Syntax Reference". Try inverse breadcrumb style "SGML Syntax Reference | Docs | SGML.js". BTW: you ranked 2nd for "SGML Syntax Reference".

- Suspicion: Content not visible (like those in the content slider) is ranked lower than always visible content. Chrome headless crawler can detect this. Add this slider content as regular text to your homepage, and also try to expand content there. Include links to your latest blogs.

- I prefer hierarchical headings, not just sections and <h1> for everything. This, because hierarchical headings can not hurt, but non-hierarchical headings could hurt.

- Finally, SGML being a standard, there are simply a lot of competitors for this keyword. These competitors are not commercial competitors, but authoritative websites with lots of informative content. Exactly the sites that Google likes to rank high. If you want to rank for SGML, you may be fighting an uphill battle.

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Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by tannhaeuser on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @01:05AM (#14494867)

Many thanks for the tips (also the other guys).

I'm aware of some of the issues you mentioned, but don't you think my site, with the depth of information provided, deserves at least a mention among the other ~200 ones? I'll try and fix the heading issues first, then see if search results improve.

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Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by pkteison on Monday June 05, 2017 @07:15PM (#14493180)

Your site shows up fine if I search for SGML Syntax Reference or SGML syntax. Meanwhile, it doesn't appear to generally be about learning basic SGML concepts, so it seems quite reasonable that it doesn't show up when just searching for SGML. And why blame Google when Bing does the same?

It seems like your complaint is that adding one page of reference info wasn't enough to serve as an ad for your business. It doesn't seem like a valid complaint to me.

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Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by whatever_dude on Monday June 05, 2017 @07:09PM (#14493135)

While your point still stands, don't you think there's things you could do to help your site index better on that topic? It has no meta data like keywords and descriptions, no robots.txt/sitemap.xml, the links to the /docs pages are hidden under an overlay that requires JavaScript to show, that URL has 10 different <H1> tags, etc.

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