MusicBrainz doesn't seem to appear in many search results?

I google:
“Music for Millions: Vol. 1” monada
and get as results this thread, including images, and an Amazon listing.
Nada Musicbrainz.
Google seems to index but not display here.

(I’ve just spent 20 minutes trying to get the browser of my choice, a fat slow incontinent dog that might need to be put down soon, to take that screen shot. Perhaps time for me to step away from the device.)

Googling:
site: musicbrainz.org “Music for Millions: Vol. 1” monada
= still no listing of Release displayed here.

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1st or 2nd result for me, despite having France country checked: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Amusicbrainz.org+“Music+for+Millions%3A+Vol.+1”+monada

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If I do the same request, results are clearly showing, but if I remove site:musicbrainz.org from query, only one page of results, and no Musicbrainz at all…

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@mmirG, can you link the release we are supposed to find? Is there a typo?

Come on, please paste a normal MB link.
My browser says I should not go there, security threat or something.

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I copy and paste URL.
And something else appears in post.
Interesting.
Let’s try again.

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I know websites that only contain descriptions of specific numbers, plaintext equivalent of hashes, digits of pi, plus the massive amount of SEO spam that’s indexed. It’s very weird that it’s Musicbrainz that gets excluded from the index that much IMO.

Hopefully MBS-10573 gets fixed some time soon and we can see if Google just dislikes duplicates.

This could be a bigger issue than the lack of textual data, it’s hard to predict.

@Zas

I’m thinking though, even if va=1 has an effect, it wouldn’t really hurt to mark it as “No, doesn’t affect page content”? The possibility that Google indexes fewer pages because of the duplicates is at least in my opinion, worse, than the chance that a bit of information might get left out on some pages.

Just noticed that with one artist Google even generates an infobox based on Musicbrainz data but doesn’t index Musicbrainz itself. So shady.

I hope they keep up the donations, because right now they’re hiding MB from potential contributors and donators.

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Here is an example of an artist I added 3 days ago and already appears on Google.

Found their name on Spotify in writer credit section. Before it didn’t appear on Google.

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A reverse image search for this cover 2020-12-05T00:20:00Z turns up a result to https://musicbrainz.org/release/88af230d-1be1-4bee-b103-04d9d4a56c5c saying “18 hours ago

In the “Pages that include matching images” section Google links to https://musicbrainz.org/

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Not sure if you already checked that, but Google also lower search result ranks based on page performance (especially in mobile). PageSpeed Insights is their recommended tool. One of the pages previously mentioned has a score of 37/100 for mobile and 66/100 for desktop. It lists a few suggestions and estimated improvements.

Here is a link to their report:

Update: I’m not into web development, but if I got it correctly, it suggests replacing this call and/or this one with either ReactDOMServer.renderToNodeStream or renderToStaticNodeStream (for static site generation) and including ReactDOM.hydrate() on the client side. Should speed up the page load and the second one should also reduce the amount of DOM elements (but seems like it breaks interactivity).

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Contrarian that I am, I want Musicbrainz to dig in their (/our) heels and say something like “dammit! We’re not going to let Google dictate how we design our webpages!”
In reality, I expect I’ll just have to settle for “we don’t have the developer resources right now to reformat our webpages to Google’s satisfaction”
What I think would be interesting would be if there was a parallel musicbrainz that was designed just to get a high google-rank, with a “mobile-friendly”, google-adsense-having version of every artist/release/event-etc entity page in musicbrainz, but no edit-links (and maybe other stuff excluded) and each “google-ized” entity page would have have a link back to the “real” musicbrainz page for that entity.

Come to think of it, I’ve seen that done for/to wikipedia, where third-party organizations would put up their own wikipedia with lots of SEO, and banner ads, but all the content was simply copied from wikipedia.

With the MusicBrainz open-data-license, I suppose someone could do the same for MusicBrainz, without having to get permission or anything. (but they should read that Data License info for themselves)

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If they were saying to do an AMP version, I would agree, but it’s not the case.
They’re pointing to reasonable stuff:

  • the initial HTML takes 3-4 seconds (vs API query that takes up to 300ms)
    They gave tips to reduce this part and indicated the React calls. Caching the rendered page html and only re-rendering user profile stuff could speed things up, or the renderToStaticNodeStream which seems to do something similar.
    The caching can be done with NGINX reverse-proxy cache, or caching generated html in the server, or generating static pages and filling missing info (mostly user profile and interactions) with javascript like in Gatsby/JAMstack.
  • after that, loading CSS/JS take another 1-2 seconds
    Could be loaded faster with an empty HTML that fetches the content instead of building the final HTML on the server (this seems to be exactly what the renderToNodeStream and ReactDOM.hydrate() does).
    CSS and JS could also be minified to reduce size and parsing time.
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I only understood about half of that, but I think I agree with you. If Google tells us ways that Musicbrainz is suboptimal in general, those are worth fixing.
But I’m grumpy about the idea (if it exists) that we would change our website just to benefit Google, or to get better Google-search results (and I strongly suspect that Google search rankings have more to do with what benefits Google than what benefits users)

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Contrarian that I am, I want Musicbrainz to dig in their (/our) heels and say something like “dammit! We’re not going to let Google dictate how we design our webpages!”

But I’m grumpy about the idea (if it exists) that we would change our website just to benefit Google, or to get better Google-search results

Okay so, most of the rules/guidelines are not really for the sake of SEO, most are just usability, stability and performance. They’re holistically more good for users than Google, it is not AMP with it’s hidden downsides.

For example when using something like Lighthouse to scan for issues, SEO is a separate category you could totally ignore - but in my experience, those are relatively trivial to fix when you’re fixing other things. Plus, let’s not forget, making it easier for search engines is making it easier for the users to find content as well - how often do you visit sites you can’t find?

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I just opened a ticket for this: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-11334

Happy to help with advice - when I had a small business I did SEO for our web site and it was typically in the top 5 for relevant searches,

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I have had a quick look at the metadata being included in the MB web pages, and I am not surprised that it does so poorly in search results as the title and description tags are not ideal, whilst other tags like keywords, character set and language are missing entirely. I don’t think the changes needed to improve things would be that difficult.

However, I believe that MB is on a par with Wikipedia in providing quality information, and if you do a search for an artist or album, I would like (or even expect) a box at the top of the right hand column (like you often get from Wikipedia) based on MB data. I have no idea how you persuade Google to put MB data in that position, but once we get the page metadata right it might be worth approaching Google to see if there is some synergy to be exploited.

P.S. Is it just me who sees a certain humour in the MetaBrainz Foundation - whose primary purpose is creating metadata (on music, books etc) - not being up to speed with delivering web-page metadata for google (and other search engines) to consume?

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That box already uses MusicBrainz metadata (which is sometimes annoying, see this thread, but that’s a separate problem).

We didn’t pay a lot of attention to this historically because we used to want to avoid getting traffic from Google - in fact, we used to block indexing fully for many years. This was mostly due to a (hopefully baseless?) fear of an influx of new users overwhelming the site without taking the time to learn the guidelines and decreasing the quality of the data. That said, you’re right that if we’re going to be indexed we might as well do it as well as we can.

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Necroing this thread because I was recently talking to a friend who is involved in archiving local music, and I was talking about MusicBrainz.

He said: “MusicBrainz never turns up in searches. The only time I get reminded that it exists is when you mention it.”

That’s terrible. It’s a massive problem.

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