up-for-grabs.net does not show up in Google for related queries

[nicolas-raoul]

30 minutes ago I had trouble remembering the name of this website, so I search "open source projects looking for volunteers" in Google. To my surprise, the site did not appear even after reading 5 pages of results. I also searched for "open source projects to contribute to", but up-for-grabs.net was not listed either.

The website is linked to by a great number of guides/etc on the Internet, so not showing up in Google results is probably the result of some obvious mistake that can most probably be fixed technically.

The website's projects list is dynamically loaded, but the rest of the HTML is not so I am not sure what is wrong.

Note: Searching for "Up for grabs" makes up-for-grabs.net show up, though.

[ritwik12]

@nicolas-raoul Hey, Thanks for opening this issue.

[ritwik12]

@nicolas-raoul So, Google PageRank works on various factors, most basic is to look for the search KEYWORDS in the websites, then it will also look at the links which are inside that website and consists of considerable search KEYWORDS used. It works as nodes of a graph and when one link consists of those KEYWORDS and another link inside that link also consists then it scores the pages and ranks them accordingly. This is the most primitive working of PageRank algorithm. So, those keywords that you have used were not considered as per the words on up-for-grabs.net website. It should be but it is lexographical and not meaning wise which is one demerit of ML and AI here.

[shiftkey]

If someone wants to suggest changes to the keywords, this is where they live in source:

up-for-grabs.net/_includes/head.html

Lines 2 to 14 in ee5c5ee

	<meta charset='utf-8' />
	<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1" />
	<meta name="description" content="Want to contribute to open source, but not sure where to start?" />
	<meta property="og:url" content="https://up-for-grabs.net" />
	<meta property="og:title" content="Up For Grabs" />
	<meta property="og:description" content="Want to contribute to open source, but not sure where to start?" />
	<meta property="og:image" content="https://up-for-grabs.net/images/logo.png" />
	<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
	<meta name="twitter:site" content="https://up-for-grabs.net" />
	<meta name="twitter:title" content="Up For Grabs" />
	<meta name="twitter:description" content="Want to contribute to open source, but not sure where to start?" />
	<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://up-for-grabs.net/images/logo.png" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

[RizkyRajitha]

hi am a new bee ,
i looked for some information on this issue ,

this suggest that we need to submit Google Webmaster Tools a sitemap.xml

meta tags are not considered is page ranking by google

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14085492/is-the-google-site-verification-meta-tag-required-for-indexing

[ritwik12]

Reading other comments in this post puts me in doubt @RizkyRajitha

[styles225]

I glanced at this page: https://up-for-grabs.net/#/filters?tags=javascript

Here's what I saw after a quick glance:

• The meta description should have more keywords:

Want to contribute to open source, but not sure where to start?

I would recommend something along the lines of: "Find and contribute to open source projects on GitHub. Use popular programming languages like JavaScript, .Net, Python and more."

• The site needs more semantic HTML like <main>, <article>, <aside> etc.
• The list of project names are wrapped in <span> tags, but wrapping them in <h3> tags would signal to search engines that they are of some importance.
• The robots.txt file looks fine.
• Like @RizkyRajitha said: submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and to Bing Webmaster Tools. Doing this gives these two search engines a direct invitation to crawl and index the site.

This really falls in the scope of SEO, but the above could help.

[deltafactory]

Google has been moving away from indexing hash URLs for pages/single page applications.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-no-hashtags-in-urls-26537.html

The History API can be used to build full URLs that Google would rather index, without reloading the page. Browsers without the proper support would still be able to navigate the site.

[fwieland]

The <title> tag is important for seo. If you add "open source contribution projects", and maybe a few other keywords it would help.

A few linking ideas:
One would be to find similar sites and see if they would post a link to your site. Or find a way to get a link on them posting to us.
Get a few blog posts together (on some other sites) about open source and make sure to link to this place.
Add a serious amount of tags (to footer) going out to related websites.
Under Popular Tags on home page is a few anchor tags, if you made sure to add links with keywords
i.e. <a **href="#>open source keyword
make sure to add rel="follow" in anchor tag when posting from another site.
And lastly for links, see where similar sites get links from and see if we could use those.

If you have access to a keyword searcher and find other words or phrases and implement that to content. This also would help. Or look at competitors and see what key words and phrases they use and implement to us.

[nicolas-raoul]

Incidentally yesterday some promising young programmer asked me where to find projects to join, and for the life of me I could not find this list... I ended up pointing them to another list which is technically inferior and has less data, but is easily findable on Google.
I only remembered the name "up-for-grabs" when I got a notification due to the post above.

Of course the website should be improved, as @fwieland wrote, but even the GitHub project makes zero effort to be discoverable (another project above for comparison):

The GitHub project should have a more findable and understandable description, and also labels.

[ritwik12]

@nicolas-raoul @deltafactory @styles225 @fwieland Thanks guys for your valuable feedbacks. This looks like we should work on this issue.

can you guys help us by submitting a PR for your feedback changes in codes?
@nicolas-raoul Let us know what other things need improvements other than descriptions. We'll update the description.

[devcer]

Is this issue still open?

[ritwik12]

@devcer Yes

[devcer]

@ritwik12 I thought I could get the SEO score up on this site but I see it is already 100. Is there anything specific that I could do to contribute to this issue?

[ritwik12]

@devcer We have a lot of action items in this issue as per the suggestions of others. You can pick one from them or if you have any good suggestions that can help in solving this issue. Please do so.

[es-rene99]

Hello I want to take a look at this issue, I can check for including more HTML5 semantics, updating the metadata description of the head.html based on the previous description for the project, and also I did a quick test in https://validator.w3.org/ where the HTML presented some minor errors I can fix.

[nicolas-raoul]

@es-rene99 Thanks! Please present your findings here and send a pull request :-)

[ghost]

New contributor.

A sitemap would be a good idea. Do we have that?

Also, we could submit the site to some lists like this (although that example already contains this project, it would be nice to find some other ones that don't and submit there).

Note that I don't know much about SEO beyond the technical aspects. I haven't optimized a site for SEO before, but I still think this might be nice.

[ritwik12]

@ConnorAhern thanks for the suggestions.

[ritwik12]

We need to prioritize this issue as I was recently trying to see if our site comes up on google without an exact name of the site like "open source projects", "open source projects for beginners" and so on. but strangely it does not come up at all. In that case a person who is just starting with open source won't be able to find this site.

[caramelmelmel]

will google analytics work or seo? what's the impact of it not implemented here?