Not to ruin your villain buzz, but a quick check shows that the same thing (zshell.dev ranks above zsh.org) is true of Bing and DDG also. It's probably closer to a root cause to say that zsh.org appears to be pretty pessimal from a search perspective, like it's being penalized for some reason. ohmyz.sh and the wikipedia page routinely rank at the top.

I have rarely (if ever) seen anyone write "z shell" or "zshell". Maybe in spoken language some people say "z shell", but Google can't search that. Everyone just writes it as "zsh". It's not surprising that another site which uses exactly that word ranks higher – zsh.org barely mentions the word "zshell".

And no one is searching for zshell either: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=zshell,zsh,ksh,cs...

In short, the example is invalid.

That said, my ranking on Google for "zshell" is Oh My Zsh, the Wikipedia article (which is titled "Z shell"), zsh.sourceforge.org, and zshell.dev, in that order. DDG is similar, except the spam site https://zshwiki.org is ranked just before zshell.org ("The Zsh framework can be used to develop LGBT inclusion initiatives [..] One of the first steps in promoting LGBT inclusion is increasing awareness of the issue among porno gay employees").

Yeah, the example was artificial to illustrate that it does come up in search results. I think I noted this later in the thread, but I originally stumbled onto this while specifically searching for some stuff on zprof. I don't recall the exact query I used, since I got pretty deeply sidetracked once I landed here.

This project's docs are way better than zsh.org, that's why. People actually find it informative and use it. Meaning you navigate to it, click around, put it on a side window, and use it while configuring zsh.

It may have better SEO as well, but the main point is that, to rise above the authoritative source, it actually also is performing way better in terms of user metrics.