Why don't Scratch projects show up in Google searches?

Fun_Cupcake_i81

This is just something I'm curious about, because I've noticed that both profile pages and studios will show up in Google searches, but projects, which are arguably the most important part of Scratch, don't. Want proof? Search up:
“project name” on scratch
(Include the quotes in your search to make sure only things that actually match the title will pop up.) This is the same name that the project tab has when it's playing. In my experience, it'll only show you users who made/favorited/remixed the project, and studios the project is in, but the actual project won't pop up. Am I just doing something wrong?

mybearworld

I think this is because the project page, before you run JavaScript, has basically no information about anything for search engines to see.

The landing page has the following meta tags in its head tag:

<!-- Search & Open Graph-->
<meta name="description" content="Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations." />
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="m_3TAXDreGTFyoYnEmU9mcKB4Xtw5mw6yRkuJtXRKxM" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://scratch.mit.edu/" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://scratch.mit.edu/images/scratch-og.png" />
<meta property="og:image:type" content="image/png" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="986" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="860" />

You can see the og:description in the actual description of the Google result:

Meanwhile, the project page just has nothing like this.

Fun_Cupcake_i81

Huh. I guess that makes sense. It's just weird that they didn't put that in.

ajskateboarder

mybearworld wrote:
I think this is because the project page, before you run JavaScript, has basically no information about anything for search engines to see.

The landing page has the following meta tags in its head tag:

<meta name="description" content="Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations." />
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="m_3TAXDreGTFyoYnEmU9mcKB4Xtw5mw6yRkuJtXRKxM" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://scratch.mit.edu/" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://scratch.mit.edu/images/scratch-og.png" />
<meta property="og:image:type" content="image/png" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="986" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="860" />
You can see the og:description in the actual description of the Google result:
https://assets.scratch.mit.edu/get_image/.%2E/603df4c3dc2cfc9f757e615bb442fcfe.png

Meanwhile, the project page just has nothing like this.

What makes even less sense is that project pages contain metadata about the project:

Yet they aren't utilized by any search engines or messaging apps that look at meta tags. Maybe it's because of data-react-helmet or something

Fun_Cupcake_i81

Hmm, that is weird. I wonder why the search engines don't seem to pull from it

Also why would data wear a helmet - by which I mean, what's a data-react-helmet???

ajskateboarder

Fun_Cupcake_i81 wrote:
Hmm, that is weird. I wonder why the search engines don't seem to pull from it

Also why would data wear a helmet - by which I mean, what's a data-react-helmet???

data-react-helmet comes from React Helmet, which is a React library for managing the head of an HTML document (don't know why it's just called react-head)

It's probably ignored because search engines can't find it without having to load JavaScript, or because it has that “data-react-helmet” thing, which is not really a common thing to add to meta tags

Last edited by ajskateboarder (Oct. 8, 2023 22:04:19)

meunspeakable

One weird thing I've noticed for years is that although the projects themselves don't appear, their remix pages do.

Clippy-Cat

meunspeakable wrote:
One weird thing I've noticed for years is that although the projects themselves don't appear, their remix pages do.

Interesting. It seems like this is because the remixes list page is still a Scratchr2 page, which I believe is more server side rendered than 3.0 pages, or at least the remix page is.

Fun_Cupcake_i81

Hmm. This is getting weirder and weirder by the minute.

god286

I did manage to find a very famous project in the search results of DuckDuckGo:
If you go to https://duckduckgo.com/?q=falcon+9+lander+scratch and go to the listing with the title “Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share” it is a link to the project but there is no metadata about the project in it. Probably because Scratch doesn't server render the modern looking pages (scratch-www)
Edit: I even got it on Google if you look for it (Still first page): https://www.google.com/search?q=falcon+9+lander+scratch (Remove the plus signs from the search bar on the page, I think it's something that the forums does)

Last edited by god286 (Oct. 9, 2023 05:14:00)

mybearworld

ajskateboarder wrote:
(#4)
What makes even less sense is that project pages contain metadata about the project:

Yet they aren't utilized by any search engines or messaging apps that look at meta tags. Maybe it's because of data-react-helmet or something

If you go to view-source:https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1234 in your browser, you'll see that they aren't there. These meta tags are added with JavaScript.

meunspeakable wrote:
(#7)
One weird thing I've noticed for years is that although the projects themselves don't appear, their remix pages do.

view-source:https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1234/remixtree has these tags:

<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Make games, stories and interactive art with Scratch. (scratch.mit.edu)"/>
<meta property="og:title" content="Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1234/remixes/" />

test_104

Yes, this is one of many, many, many advantages that scratchr2 has over scratch-www. It's a very long list. SEO is another problem with scratch-www that scratchr2 just doesn't have!

Fun_Cupcake_i81

Huh. So I guess Scratch 2.0 is just plain better then XD At least when it comes to Google!

ajskateboarder

mybearworld wrote:
ajskateboarder wrote:
(#4)
What makes even less sense is that project pages contain metadata about the project:

Yet they aren't utilized by any search engines or messaging apps that look at meta tags. Maybe it's because of data-react-helmet or something
If you go to view-source:https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1234 in your browser, you'll see that they aren't there. These meta tags are added with JavaScript.

Ohh that's so dumb xd

I found the code that does this here. Scratch just needs to fix its usage of react-helmet or maybe move to a dedicated meta tag library (although the former might be easier)

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