Request: do SEO optimization for eips.ethereum.org

[virgil]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I often google for specific EIPs, for example, say EIP1948. But the pleasant display at eips.ethereum.org rarely (if ever) comes up. So then I have to go eips.ethereum.org and then manually search for it.

Describe the solution you'd like
When I search for something like "EIP1948", "EIP-1948", or "EIP 1948", I want eips.ethereum.org to be the first or second hit on Google.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I have no access rights to attempt this.

Additional context
To reduce competition for this space, one thing we could use is use Google Webmaster Tools to remove sites all URLs matching: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/*.md from the Google index. I don't actually recommend doing this until we have eips.ethereum.org at least in the top 10 of results.

[samajammin]

Thanks for bringing this up @virgil! I think there's lots of opportunities for improvement depending on how we want to approach this.

To start, What is the ultimate result of what you'd like to achieve? Making EIPs more easily discoverable? Once they are discovered, making them more easily digestible (i.e. through a more appealing web UI)?

To your point, spot-checking a handful of Google search queries clearly shows eips.ethereum.org is not ranking well for terms that it could/should be. Even the Github repository's URLs (among other sites) seem to always rank higher than the website.

It's a bit difficult to quantify how much opportunity exists if we were to improve rankings. There's no tracking on the site to know it's current usage (I've submitted a PR to add Matomo) but tools like SimilarWeb suggest it's not getting much traffic. From some basic keyword research in Google Adwords, there doesn't appear to be significant volume (other than "erc20" and "erc721" related terms that get >1K searches/month) but I suspect there's a bunch of long-tail searches for specific EIPs like the ones you mentioned that form significant search volume in aggregate.

I agree it would be valuable if this content was more easily discoverable, though it’s debatable if it’s within the scope of this project (vs. creating this issue in the EIPs repo). In my mind, there are two core options.

1. Optimize the existing site (eips.ethereum.org)
2. Migrate content from eips.etherum.org to ethereum.org/eips

For option 1, there's some simple changes we could make to potentially get some wins, like updating the title tag templates of EIP pages to always include the number of the EIP. For instance, EIP 1948 that you mentioned - it's current title tag is Non-fungible Data Token | Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Instead of appending | Ethereum Improvement Proposals to every page's title tag, which is super generic, it should probably be more targeted (like Non-fungible Data Token | EIP 1948).

Optimizations to the current site (e.g. updating title tags) would definitely help but I believe the surest approach to achieve rankings with EIP pages would be to migrate the content from eips.ethereum.org to ethereum.org/eips. While SEO is no perfect science, it's generally agreed that subdirectories perform better than subdomains. Moving / mirroring content on ethereum.org/eips could rank well quickly from all the link authority the core ethereum.org domain has built up over the years (26K referring domains on ethereum.org vs. 1K referring domains on eips.ethereum.org). Migrating to ethereum.org could also bring UX advantages, e.g. we already have a site search feature that would allow people to search by EIP number. It'd also be easier to integrate EIP content into our Translation Program if the content exists within this repository.

To be clear, if we were to move the site content from eips.ethereum.org to ethereum.org/eips, I'm not suggesting we also migrate the entire Github repository. It would probably just be a script to pull in merged EIP pages & 301 redirect rules on eips.ethereum.org. I think it makes sense to keep that dedicated repo to create & discuss EIPs.

Might be worth fleshing out pros/cons of options & gathering some feedback from people. I'm not sure who we'd need to gather rough consensus from to make either initiative happen. @jjmstark @Souptacular feel free to weigh in.

[Souptacular]

Tagging Nick Johnson who I believe runs eips.ethereum.org. @Arachnid

[Souptacular]

My opinion: There isn't harm in using Matamoto to gather user data (as long as we put a pop-up on EIPS.ethereum.org) if it will help our SEO. How best to accomplish this I will need to think on. I believe eips.ethereum.org runs on Jekyll.

[evertonfraga]

That's a great idea @virgil,

As an EIP user, i'd love to see a summary of the EIP page, pretty much like this:

The most straightforward way to do it, is defining the Structured Data Markup, a JSON included into the source code.

<!-- JSON-LD markup generated by Google Structured Data Markup Helper. -->
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Article",
  "name" : "EIP 663: Unlimited SWAP and DUP instructions",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Alex Beregszaszi"
  },
  "datePublished" : "2017-07-03",
  "articleSection" : "Abstract Currently, SWAP and DUP instructions are limited to a stack depth of 16. Introduce two new instructions, SWAPn and DUPn, which lift this limitation and allow accessing the stack up to its full depth of 1024 items.",
  "articleBody" : "Motivation</H2> […]",
  "url" : "https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-663"
}
</script>

[Arachnid]

While I don't have any objection to EIPs being on ethereum.org/eips, doing this would require an automated process (presumably via travis) to build and push the site on each update. I'm not up for maintaining such a system right now, and I'm not sure how ethereum.org is rendered at present in any case.

For other changes, the source of the site is all in the EIPs repo - PRs are welcome!

[fulldecent]

This thread will turn into a discussion. But I propose the following to address SEO concerns.

A brief introduction: SEO is my day job.

Proposed workplan:

• Enable Google Search Console on all Ethereum web properties
  • You can add me with view access. Call me to set this up.
  • This does not collect any more data from visitors or require additional tagging.
• Promote ONE of the following reference types: "EIP-1" "EIP1" or "EIP 1".
  • See Style Guide -- EIP123 or EIP-123? EIPs#1464
• Adopt a preferred citation format to the EIPs website
  • Done: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs#preferred-citation-format
• Update preferred citation format to require people reference draft EIPS like "ERC-721 (DRAFT)"
  • Because people start a PR and then go on a marketing campaign using the GitHub URL
  • Instead they should start a SECOND marketing campaign after they get a EIPs.ethereum.org URL
  • This will be evident that there is more work to do when everyone is seeing the word "(DRAFT)" in their face
• Improve the text of the EIP homepage so that more people want to go there than the GitHub repo
  • Add a mission statement: Add mission statement EIPs#1128
  • Make the EIP homepage as good as https://apple.github.io/swift-evolution/
• Update all links in this repo that link to the GitHub.com/... (I can do this)
• Generat a list of all places that link to GitHub.com/... and ask them to instead link to EIPS.ethereum.org
  • I have been working on this
  • If you want to help let's talk

[samajammin]

Thanks for your review & comment @Arachnid! With any solution we choose, I'm definitely not looking to add any additional overhead for you or for any other EIP editors/maintainers. I'm working as a full-time developer on ethereum.org full time & I believe I could have the capacity to maintain this system. I just want to first confirm with others that it would actually add value.

Thanks for the thoughtful proposal @fulldecent! I agree with all your suggestions. One question regarding:

Update all links in this repo that link to the GitHub.com/

Could you clarify this one? Update the links to what?

I'm also curious to hear your take on the other option I mentioned above - migrating the content from eips.ethereum.org to ethereum.org/eips. In my opinion (as someone who has also had an SEO day job) & from professionals I've spoken to, that would be an additional way to improve rankings & provide additional exposure/accessibility of EIPs.

[fulldecent]

Links to GitHub.com

Some places (including in eips.ethereum.org) are linking to EIPs at GitHub.org. Last year if you searched the web for "ERC20 specification" at the top it would be ethereum/EIPs#20 now you will see Wikipedia or https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20.

This is the effort I am working on.

eips.ethereum.org or ethereum.org/eips

It is critical that the GitHub repo is quickly connected to the published website. This is done now using GitHub pages. Hosting at ethereum.org/eips would require an Apache reverse proxy (or similar) to GitHub pages, or a different deploy pipeline.

I do not recommend moving the EIPs website because:

1. The EIP editors and authors do not speak for the Ethereum project. So the EIPs should not be directly on ethereum.org.
2. The extra infrastructure / devops to make it work will not provide incremental value.
3. It took me a year to ask everybody to repoint their links to ERC: Non-fungible Token Standard EIPs#721 into https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721, along with all the other EIPs. It will be painful to ask them to move again. (This includes websites, patents, SEC filings, academic journals, etc.)

[fulldecent]

@virgil Also, you do not have permission to remove GitHub.com/... from the Google index. Only GitHub has that permission.

[fulldecent]

I have some PRs ready to go:

ethereum/EIPs#2369
ethereum/EIPs#2370
ethereum/EIPs#2371

And other quick fixes while you're here

ethereum/EIPs#2372
ethereum/EIPs#2373

---

^^ These move in the right direction of SEO.

I think nothing more is in scope here and this issue can be closed as solved after the above are merged.

---

If we will go further, and I think we should, we can make a new issue to adopt this policy:

EIP numbers are assigned by the EIP editors at the request of EIP authors (merging a PR that creates a DRAFT). Until the draft is published, no reference shall be made to "EIP-####" or "ERC-####". Instead you may refer to "Issue ####" or "PR ####".

And then fix all existing text in /EIPS/. This will strongly incentivize people to make a high-quality document and get an ERC number before spamming the EIPS repository and starting a marketing campaign that "OMG I wrote an EIP, let's raise money". These premature marketing campaigns for pre-draft documents, which link directly to GitHub Issues are directly the reason why Google ranks GitHub issues before our intended (and higher quality) EIPS website.