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Web search engine compatibility #289

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astyled opened this issue Dec 7, 2023 · 5 comments
Open

Web search engine compatibility #289

astyled opened this issue Dec 7, 2023 · 5 comments
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bug Something isn't working

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@astyled
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astyled commented Dec 7, 2023

I have noticed this a few times when I was searching for some userstyles, and it was recently pointed in #287 in a comment (at the very bottom), that search engines are not able to correctly index USw. This makes it appear very rarely in the results and always broken.
@astyled astyled added the bug Something isn't working label Dec 7, 2023
@astyled
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astyled commented Dec 7, 2023

image

@astyled
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astyled commented Jan 2, 2024 •
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Some research:

  • all websites i tried duplicate content in <meta name="description"> and <meta property="og:description">;
  • i think we should only keep USw description (A new free and open-source, community-driven, modern alternative to userstyles.org.) for service pages like home, explore, and have something else for UGC pages like profiles and styles;
  • we should de-markdown descriptions of profiles for the meta tags;
  • we need a description placeholder for cases where there's no or not enough content in profile biography. like Browse {username}'s userstyles at userstyles.world — a new free and open-source, community-driven userstyles repository;
  • something similar may be good for style descriptions. {short description}. Get this userstyle for {category} on userstyles.world.

@myfonj
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myfonj commented Jan 28, 2025

Came here to report recent strange observation regarding search engines: Google seems to be indexing just fine recently, but Bing (so also DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and all other clients sharing the index) has not indexed a single style page from the USW.

As a quick test I've picked some random word from the front page and did a query site:userstyles.world tutanota:

It seems really strange that Bing indexed nearly everything other than the style pages.

Not a SEO expert, but I guess the aforementioned advice is sound; looking at HTML source of the style page (view-source:https://userstyles.world/style/2325/tutanota-modern-rewritten)

Fig. HTML header 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html data-color-scheme="dark" lang="en">
	<head>
		<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
<meta name="title" content="UserStyles.world">
<meta name="color-scheme" content="dark light">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#679cd0">
<meta name="description" content="A new free and open-source, community-driven, modern alternative to userstyles.org.">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://userstyles.world/style/2325/tutanota-modern-rewritten">
<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="UserStyles.world search" href="/opensearch.xml">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.css?v=88bafed5" type="text/css" media="screen">
<link rel="mask-icon" href="/mascot.svg" color="blue">
<link rel="icon" href="/mascot.svg">
<title>Tutanota Modern (rewritten) — UserStyles.world</title>


<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://userstyles.world/style/2325">
<meta property="og:title" content="Tutanota Modern (rewritten) by Freeplay">
<meta property="og:description" content="Minimal, Neater, And makes drastically better use of space than Tutanota&#39;s current design.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://userstyles.world/preview/2325/1.webp">
<meta property="twitter:url" content="https://userstyles.world/style/2325">
<meta property="twitter:title" content="Tutanota Modern (rewritten) by Freeplay">
<meta property="twitter:description" content="Minimal, Neater, And makes drastically better use of space than Tutanota&#39;s current design.">
<meta property="twitter:image" content="https://userstyles.world/preview/2325/1.webp">
<meta property="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

<script defer src="/js/main.js?v=88bafed5"></script>

	</head>
	<body data-flags="{}">
		<a href="#content">Skip to content</a>

I think that <meta name="description" content="A new free and open-source, community-driven, modern alternative to userstyles.org."> is slightly off for this "details" page, as previously noted, but otherwise it seems fine. https://userstyles.world/robots.txt is also OK, and HTTP headers as well, so it seems like a conundrum, why Bing decided to ignore it. Sadly, I don't remember doing such search in the past, so cannot tell whether it worked before or not. Do you see robots in access logs?

@astyled
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astyled commented Jan 29, 2025

Regarding Bing and it's other frontends, USw has been out of it's index throughout most of it's lifetime since 2021. It is not known why, the other USw developers were not able to communicate this with Bing support.

The scope of this issue is to at least get descriptions displayed nicely on engines that work.

@myfonj
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myfonj commented Jan 30, 2025

USw has been out of [Bing's] index […]. It is not known why, the other USw developers were not able to communicate this with Bing support.

Ah, thanks for clearing it up! (And glad now this info can be looked up in issues here.)

The scope of this issue is to at least get descriptions displayed nicely on engines that work.

I see, Google really tends to pick pretty irrelevant pieces of content, like Details · Statistics · Description · Notes · Source code · Reviews.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:userstyles.world+unround&tbs=li:1

Google SERP for "site:userstyles.world unround" in "verbatim" mode; most snippets contain "Details · Statistics · Description · Notes · Source code · Reviews.", others some sentences from middle of descriptions.

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