[BUG] Documentation is not indexed by search engines

[orenbenkiki]

Search for +"dash.no_update" site:dash.plot.ly in any search engine (google, bing, duckduckgo). They will all say "no results" (well, Google will unhelpfully display a single result for the documentation of the DatePicker). None will locate the https://dash.plot.ly/state page which mentions dash.no_update three times :-(

[rpkyle]

@orenbenkiki Thanks a lot for noting this, I believe the same is true for https://dashr.plot.ly.

@jdamiba

[chriddyp]

A few things should help with this:

1. Speeding up the page load time. Bringing lazy loading to Dash should be the biggest win here.
2. Perhaps resubmitting the sitemap to google and/or updating the last modified dates of the sitemap.
3. Providing a tree-like index of all of the pages on this site.
4. Updating the meta description of this page to include the keyword topics like state, no_update
5. Providing a traditional API reference page including all of the objects available in the library.

1 is being worked on right now by @Marc-Andre-Rivet 2 we could try. 3 I'm working on this as part the package branch. 4 Is a good idea. We could update the index_template string so that this gets served serverside instead of clientside. The meta descriptions should match up with the chapter descriptions that are being unified in 3. 5 Is a good idea and not being worked on right now. But let's revisit after the package branch is merged.

[ned2]

While it's clearly important to focus on fixing the SEO for the Dash Docs, it would be great if search engines could properly crawl Dash apps more generally, so I guess option 1 is the most relevant there.

[rpkyle]

@nicolaskruchten Is anyone else looking into this issue (via the Google Search console) now that @jdamiba is unassigned?

I'm just curious what else can be done (or I can do) to make the Dash for R documentation a bit more visible.

[rpkyle]

Adding index customization to Dash for R is now high priority, since it will unlock adding meta tags to the documentation.

This should immediately help improve the page rank for the docs. Now that hot reloading support is available (plotly/dashR#127), once we have async support in R, the feature set required for Dash 1.0 parity should be complete.

@alexcjohnson

[chriddyp]

Update on https://github.com/plotly/dash-docs/issues/647#issuecomment-535994765

1. Getting a lot closer with all of the great async work that has been happening https://community.plot.ly/t/dash-1-6-0-released/30875
2. The sitemap has been fixed & updated in https://github.com/plotly/dash-docs/pull/641/commits/640194a0b693e92c338d303aa57ff1b2486f4f3c. It was very stale. I'll resubmit it once that PR is merged. I haven't added date modified dates.
3. https://github.com/plotly/dash-docs/pull/641/ gets us closer, but I'll probably do it in a separate PR.
4. https://github.com/plotly/dash-docs/pull/641/ unifies all of the descriptions and actually displays the page descriptions in the meta description tag. The descriptions that we use in the index pages are the same ones that we use in the meta descriptions. I haven't really updated them, but it'll be much easier to do so after #641 is merged.
5. Still a good idea. #641 gets us a little closer by adding reference pages for all of the components, but it still doesn't add deeper API reference.

[chriddyp]

Update on https://github.com/plotly/dash-docs/issues/647#issuecomment-535994765

1. The pages load faster now, thanks to all of the great Dash performance work in the latest releases (https://community.plotly.com/tag/announcements) but for some pages, still not quite fast enough. Some pages are indexed as the "Loading...." screen 😿
2. Has been done and sitemaps are part of the tests now
3. We have a sidebar and persistent breadcrum now, but it is rendered clientside, so hard to say if that's helping
4. Still a good idea, and something we're still planning on doing
5. Still a good idea, and something we're still planning on doing

Re 1 - Thanks to @eliasdabbas 's great work, we're adding server-side rendering to the Dash docs so that on initial page load, all of the content will be rendered in HTML. We have high hopes that this will improve the indexing! See @eliasdabbas 's progress in https://github.com/plotly/dash-docs/pull/875

[chriddyp]

Update:

5. Is finally done in https://github.com/plotly/dash-docs/pull/1131

[chriddyp]

We have results on google now.

Hoping the new reference page that covers dash.no_update and more will get indexed soon as well.