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Comments on Questions themselves are not the first Codidact hits on Google
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Questions themselves are not the first Codidact hits on Google
I got the two best ranked questions in Software Development Codidact and searched their titles verbatim in Google,
- Does the location of an import statement affect performance in Python?
- How should we share some content between two otherwise-independent git repositories?
I submitted the queries from Tor sessions so as not to stain the results with possible local filtering and to repeat the experiment from some different locations.
Stack Overflow had always the first results, even though there was no perfect match, but that is not what surprised me.
From Netherlands exit node
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The first Codidact result (the only one on the first page) was posts tagged Python.
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The first Codidact results (the only ones on the first page) were Monica Cellio's activities and, next, posts tagged version control.
From United States exit node
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The first Codidact result (the only one on the second page) was Software Development questions sorted by score.
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The first Codidact result (the only one on the second page) was Meriton's profile.
From Austria exit node
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No results on the first three pages.
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Second and third results on Google, again Monica Cellio's activities and posts tagged version control.
What about DuckDuckGo?
No results on the first three pages in any case.
Discussion
What could be the reasons for Google not to list the questions themselves as results, but instead to list pages that contain links to those questions?
Surely we cannot change Google's sorting algorithm, but is there something at all that can be done at Codidact to improve the chance that the questions are the first Codidact hits? Maybe this is something that will solve itself as Codidact becomes more popular and we should only be patient?
PS: I made similar experiments with Writing posts, with similar results, namely the questions per se were not the first Codidact hit. With Electrical Engineering, however, I could get a question to be the hit, so it is at least possible.
Post
All our posts are indexed and have applicable meta tags in the page. Search Console confirms that we are showing up in Google search results.
Our biggest problem is our still-small size: the more inbound links there are to pages on Codidact sites, the more Google likes us, but inbound links develop over time as people get to know about us. Our second biggest problem is that we don't have any developers specialising in SEO — we've done the basics as much as we can, but if anyone knows more about SEO then we're open to suggestions!
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