python / python/docs-community

Extremely poor docs.python.org SEO performance.

Open
#179 36 comments 32 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Makefile
Stars
55
Forks
26
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Describe the bug
docs.python.org has atrocious search performance on Google. It's so bad that I suspect Google is actively downranking it for some reason.

To Reproduce
Search Google for virtually any Python documentation topic. The ones that drove me here were searches for [python set] and [python shuffle list].

Expected behavior
docs.python.org is the authoritative source for Python documentation on the web. I expect to find relevant results on docs.python.org somewhere on the first page of Google search results.

Instead, I find the opposite. For [python set] I expect to find https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#set
somewhere on the first page of results, but instead, the only python.org result I see is for the long-deprecated
Python 2 sets module --
https://docs.python.org/2/library/sets.html

For [python shuffle list], neither https://docs.python.org/3/library/random.html nor any other python.org result shows up anywhere on the first page.

Screenshots
image
image

Additional context
These results are egregious enough to make me suspect you're
being actively downranked for some reason. This isn't a request for general SEO optimization -- although that'd be a great project if someone has the interest -- but for a domain admin to try to use Google's search console (https://developers.google.com/search) to investigate if there's something egregiously wrong with an easy fix.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with Google Search Console and the example queries and URLs in the issue: the Python 3 set documentation and random documentation pages. Investigate whether an indexing or ranking problem explains the results; the issue is done only when a specific cause and an actionable remediation are identified, rather than general SEO improvements.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation, search
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
32/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.