Update 02/18/2018: – Expected search result is back on Google. Perhaps it was just a bug after all.
I use AngularJS (aka Angular 1) in my daily work. When I need to look up documentation for something specific, I just search for it on Google. At least I used to do that. Few days ago I noticed that this approach was no longer working.
For example today I wanted to look up behavior of $watchGroup method and did not see any any official Angular documentation in the search result. I tried the same search on Duck Duck Go and saw the expected page as their first result.
I searched for the same thing on Bing and it was at the top as well.
I repeated my search on Google and noticed a link to the official documentation all the way at the bottom. But instead of linking to the specific page it was linking to the top level domain instead.
At the same time I am not sure what to make out of these search results. Is this just a bug or something that is being done by Google on purpose? Angular team has previously stated that traffic to Angular 1 and Angular 2 sites will serve as an indicated when they should End of Life Angular 1. Obviously, Angular 1 site will receive a lot less traffic if it’s no longer showing up in Google search results.
This observation further solidified my opinion that It’s NOT OK to Still Use Angular 1 in 2018. I will also have to switch my dev browser to Duck Duck Go, until all our apps are migrated to React 🙂
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If you search for “site:docs.angularjs.org $watchGroup” on Google it shows no results at all. The entire “/api” section of the website is missing from the results. When I cross compare with Bing and Duck it appears they are yielding cached search results. So I took at look at the source HTML for the API section and it looks like something has changed. The documentation is no longer SEO friendly. There are no links internal links for a web crawler to index any of the API methods. Google being the larger search engine appears to have updated their indexes first, but I fear the other search providers will quickly drop the missing URLs. This all feels like it is related to the recent 1.6 release of AngularJS which happened last month, and index changes in search results take about a month. I browsed the history on GitHub and found that the team has been making changes to the docs website and specifically the made changes to sitemaps.xml and other SEO important parts. To fair, this looks like a simple mistake and I’ll open a GitHub issue to report it (if it isn’t already). We can assume that this will get quickly fixed and that the Google search results return to their previous state. Keep in mind that the angularjs.org domain out ranks all the other domains in the search results. So I don’t think there will be any worries about getting top of the page results working again.
After further investigation. I’ve found that this might actually be a ranking change for AngularJS. The sitemaps and SEO appears to be working after all, and $watchGroup does appear in the search results if you try “site:docs.angularjs.com $watchGroup”. I wanted to open an issue to report the problem, but if you open an issue now for Angular the default template reads like a long legal document. This template is horrible and I just walked away saying “screw this” as it appears they want to make reporting issues as difficult as possible.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they manually adjusted score for this domain, to make it rank less. Which would be upsetting because the result that Duck Duck Go and Bing show IS the best result for “$watchGroup” querying has nothing to do with Angular 2 (hence no need to de promote it even if you ARE trying to prop up Angular 2)