Making your docs display better in search results¶

Google search engine results with the page title, URL, and a description.¶

Displaying more relevant information in search results will cause more people to click through to your docs. Again, your goal is not to use cheap tactics to rank better and trick users into clicking. Rather, you are trying to legitimately improve your content such that users better understand what to expect on a page before they click.

Some of the most important aspects of improved search listings are:

• Use descriptive and accurate titles in the HTML <title> tag. With Sphinx, the <title> comes from the top heading on the page.
• Ensure your URLs are descriptive. They are displayed in search results. For Sphinx, the URL uses the source file’s filename.
• Make sure the words your readers would search for to find your site are actually included on your pages. Ideally, these key words should be in your <title> or description.

These concepts are not only important in helping guide users to click on your documentation, most of the same optimizations are useful to the search engine when indexing your site and when ranking your site for searchers.

Helping search engines understand your docs¶

Search engines like Google and Bing crawl through the internet following links and redirects in an attempt to understand and build an index of what various pages and sites are about.

These tips and features can help you control how search engines index your docs:

• Make sure your entire site can be navigated by following links. If you have “orphan” pages, a search engine won’t find them. Using Sphinx’s “toctree” directive helps make sure all your pages are indexed and navigable.
• Redirects and canonical URLs are useful when the same content exists in multiple places or moves from one page to another. Read the Docs dashboard lets authors setup redirects from one page to another or from one version of the documentation to another.
• Using a robots.txt and sitemap.xml file can help you control how search engines crawl your docs. For example, you could tell search engines to ignore unsupported versions of your documentation. Read the Docs provides both a robots.txt and a sitemap and has ways for you to override them.

Improving your SEO ranking from feedback¶

Search engines provide tools to help webmasters build their site better and to give insights and feedback about the indexing of sites by the search engine spiders. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are tools for webmasters to get feedback about the crawling of their sites (or docs in our case). These tools can show technical issues with indexing like pages that are failing for some reason and also possible security or spam issues on your site that can lower your ranking.

Google search console showing an issue with user generated spam, a constant battle at Read the Docs.¶

Feedback on keywords users use to find your docs is also really helpful. This is true both for the phrases people searched for on a search engine and for the search terms people queried in Sphinx and Read the Docs’ built-in search features. Analytics tools like Google Analytics can provide these insights, but as part of our search improvements and search analytics, Read the Docs is going to show project maintainers the most common search queries to help them improve as well.

SEO is no substitute for good writing¶

One area we didn’t detail in our guide is how more general improvements to technical writing can also improve your search engine rankings. This could be a whole post by itself.

Using simpler words, for example, has a number of advantages in technical writing. The excellent Microsoft Style Guide recommends using simple words and concise sentences and Apple’s Style Guide echoes the same sentiment. Simpler sentences are easier to understand for both people as well as machines like search engines and automatic translators.

While any style guide you read will tell you to avoid using jargon, technical writing and software docs have a certain amount of unavoidable technical terminology. Defining these terms and phrases when you first use them helps users as well as search engines.

In summary¶

Always keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to make your docs more discoverable by people, not machines. While the concepts and tactics here will help you rank better with search engines, providing high quality documentation and making it easier to find and understand is the best way to make sure people actually read the docs.