Forum is (pretty much) absent in goolge search results

Rpahut

Is it just me or is google really reluctant to show godotforums in search results?
For example, I happen to be searching for "godot parallaxbackground" today, and there is like one or two results way down the list, after github repos and some personal blogs even. This seem strange, since here have been the main place to discuss things Godot for awhile now.

Internal search here shows of course many recent discussions involving "parallaxbackground", and they in fact can be found in google using more specific queries. It just that simply searching for "Godot" doesn't seem to rank godotforums high at all, for whatever reason.
Perhaps there are some ajustments that could be made to the website to 'fix' this?

Megalomaniak

Rpahut I happen to be searching for "godot parallaxbackground" today

I did find a forum result on the first page, it just wasn't within the first 3 results. But it's also worth remembering that google results are targeted to the user based on past search queries and search results followed(clicked through). Also you can always append site: godotforums.org to filter search results to a specific site.

Rpahut

Megalomaniak Well I feel like godotforums would normally be placed +- where godotengine is. Or above, as that one been out of operation for several monts now. It is unusual of Google to rank a thematic and actively updated source so low.
Can't even think of three places that deserve to be placed above godotforums. Is Reddit a better place to discuss Godot?

Also pretty sure it isn't personal targeting - it's the same in private mode and other search engines.

Megalomaniak

Rpahut Also pretty sure it isn't personal targeting - it's the same in private mode and other search engines.

The relevance of the personal targetting is that as you keep searching for things and clicking through to the forum results, the forum results should start appearing further up the list. And over time with enough godoters making such searches and clicking through to the forum results the non-targeted results should start showing that change too.

As for the state of the results right now, the forum did change hosts this year so even though the domain remained the same, actual server IP changed which might have affected google search engines 'result certainty'(I'm sure they have some weighted confidence value for it) and thus rankings.

Rpahut Is Reddit a better place to discuss Godot?

I'd say that's subjective. But generally speaking Reddit is much more populous on the whole, so it would naturally score better with google.

DaveTheCoder

Rpahut Is Reddit a better place to discuss Godot?

I do most of my Godot discussing here. But for hard Godot questions, I've found:
Discord > Godot Forums > Reddit

Reddit tends to be bloated with questions like "How do I learn Godot?".

award

Yeah, I don't think these forums are SEO'd, whereas ask.godotengine.org and reddit.com/r/godot are. Actually I find most forums for most things tend to eschew SEO unless they're part of a big platform like Reddit.

GuardianOfAsg

I had the same issue with my small site not showing up well, and I found that submitting pages directly with internal links helped a bit. I also started tracking changes through rankyak.com, it gives a clear picture of how things shift over time, which helped me rule out some guesses and focus on what actually made a difference.