When I google “Migasala SuttaCentral,” links to Discuss & Discover, the chat site portion of SuttaCentral, show up in Google’s results, but SuttaCentral, where we can find the actual Migasalasutta, doesn’t. Is this fixable, or is it an eternal quirk of Google?
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So if I put the macrons on “Migasālā,” SuttaCentral shows up instead of Discuss & Discover, but most people don’t search with macrons.
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FWIW, Chade-meng Tan told me that search is more dark art than science. Having said which, perhaps we could add a de-diacriticalled version of the title in metadata?
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Maybe, bhante, I wouldn’t know. To be quite honest about my ignorance, I’m not really even sure what “cookies” are.
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FWIW, searching for migasala (no diacritics) in the actual suttacentral.net search shows the sutta as the first (and second) result. I’m guessing because the word is in the English title of the sutta.
Some quick reading on line seems to indicate that google is indeed diacritic sensitive and can’t be made otherwise.
That’s worth a try, but the ancient SEO lore says that The Algorithm gave up on metadata for search results after the dark forces started keyword packing. In the long run it may be better to try and solve the problems with the in-site search. The evil wizards that control The Algorithm change things at will, so what works today may not work tomorrow.
Of course that won’t help for non-site users trying to discover things on google.
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Indeed, I have always tried to follow the inerring Word of Google:
Thou shalt not Game search results, lest stern Judgement fall upon thy soul. For one who serves quality Content in valid, semantic HTML is blessed by the wise and need fear no down-ranking.
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Some people call them “bisquits”.
(What some of us used to call a microsoft answer; accurate, and anywhere but to the point; offered, like the following sentence, mostly for humor.)
Cookies are AFAIK snacks for human tummies and corporate data miners.
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I think you’re on to something here Bhante. However you know much more than I do in regards to building a website and this is speaking purely from not knowing how you organize the site. So forgive me if I am off key, my intention is purely to help if ever possible.
For my companies website we add the keywords using meta data in the header, with great results. Edit: from what I remember. But, I could be wrong. Don’t want to lie…*
Example for Sutta Central Mahaparinibbana sutta, you could do the following without diacritics as you and Snow Bird had mentioned:
“””” <meta name=”keywords” content=”mahaparinibbana sutta,suttacentral,sutta central,sutta,central”/> “”””
Ignore the “””” if I don’t add them the site hides it in the comment lol
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Google has already caught up on my end. I’ve googled dhammacakkappavattana sutta, satipatthana sutta and anapanasati sutta and suttacentral shows up on the front page of all three results. Not sure if this is because google has picked up that I visit this site often and is giving me personalized results, but it seems to be working fine for me.
Migasala sutta is also a comparatively obscure sutta to be looking up. I didn’t try it with any other sutta, to be honest. More commonly searched suttas might not have this problem.
It will take time for The Algorithm to reach perfection…
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You can use the backtick character to display inline code like this `<code>`, which produces <code>
Or use three backticks as a code fence like this
```
<code>
<code>
```
which produces
<code>
<code>
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Thanks, friend. Appreciate taking the time to teach me something new 
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