Section for "contextual components" & google search

[MichalBryxi]

I noticed that somewhere around v3.14 the note about "Contextual components" has moved from "Wrapping content in a component" and in v3.19 it lives in section called Patterns for Components. Which is fine.

But this reveals two a possible problems:

Google for whatever reason points at article about block content and v3.3.0 of guides. Both options are sub-optimal.

Even when searching on v3.19 guides via inline Algolia search, I will get no relevant results

The content has been there for quite a while, so that does not seem just like a "stale cache" problem. Maybe those are related. Not sure.

[ijlee2]

Hi, @MichalBryxi. Thanks for reporting this issue!

I'm not sure what we may have done to cause Google's search results to be suboptimal, and whether I or someone else can help out with this issue.

I think I can help out with optimizing index and search for Algolia, though. I haven't looked into code but I'm guessing that we're using a default setup and haven't worked on optimizing search for a documentation website.

[MichalBryxi]

If the guides website is registered as a property in Google Search Console, then it's possible to submit a sitemap or individual URL for indexing.
As far as I can tell guides do not generate sitemap.json, which I think might help for Google to get a better grasp on the content. So this might be a place for improvement.

[mansona]

so there are actually 2 issues in what you're bringing up here @MichalBryxi , the first being the search index in Algolia not having what you expect and the second being a search that you made from google not showing the link to the latest documentation.

we should probably separate these two issues out, especially since there will be oddities in the google search investigation (like the fact that I personally don't see the issue that you're talking about 🙈 clicking your example search shows the latest release as the top link). Also the issue isn't having a sitemap.json because that only improves the speed of indexing and makes sure that certain parts that aren't linked internally actually get indexed, these sorts of issues are usually related to canonical links not being setup correctly 👍

[MichalBryxi]

Split the issue into two. Second one is: #1488

[MichalBryxi]

I'm suggesting sitemap.json simply because (quote from Google):

If your site’s pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites, or more specialized files.

Which I read as: Could not hurt.

When you say @mansona

clicking your example search shows the latest release as the top link

Is the link you're clicking this one and firs result you see it this one? Because that one is indeed the latest one, but that one does not contain the phrase "contextual components" at all.

And then second link for me goes to older version of the guides.

[mansona]

ok so it looks like something broke, roughly at the time of the 3.3 guides 🙈 Guidemaker is designed to setup the canonical link correctly especially for SEO so that you don't get links to older versions of the guides in search results.

And also, sure building a sitemap is something that we could look into but it is not better than making sure that your site is correctly laid out with HTML and meta-data. Fixing meta-data issues like the canonical link and other known issues with redirections is a much higher priority than implementing a sitemap.json for SEO reasons 👍 I know there seems like there is a lot of complexity going on with this site, but to google this is the simplest site in the world 🎉 it's just a collection of static HTML files 😂