I’ve noticed that MusicBrainz is not well-indexed in google.
For example this search for an artist I created a few years ago (Morlox) does not turn up a (direct) link to his musicbrainz page, or to any of the pages for events he’s performed in.
While I wouldn’t suggest a full course of SEO, this situation does seem a little suboptimal.
Is there something that musicbrainz is doing “wrong” that limits how much google spiders musicbrainz?
Could it be a problem for Google, that there are no browse-links anymore?
We’ve established sitemaps for our site in cooperation with Google, so this is officially a bug. Can you please open an MBS ticket for this so we can look at it in detail?
Thanks!
I don’t pretend to know the inner workings of MB admin or what deals they’ve made with Google.
But…
I’d like to hear about whether anyone can reproduce this.
I’m especially interested in this because I think it affects the event-listing part of musicbrainz. Not being very discoverable-via-google, is limiting the rate of new adopters, both of the “hearing about musicbrainz-in-general for the first time” variety and the “Musicbrainz does events now?” variety.
If I click your OP link I get taken to
Though I’m logged into Google on this browser and they have my recent browsing history which includes musicbrainz. ??
When I click the link, I get two results - morlox and herpes hideaway
But, after seeing the pages and clicking around a bit, I have a question…
Why does one person need four artist pages?
EDIT CORRECTION - it is SIX artist pages!
I consider myself fairly new, and am still learning. But I am still not clear on when we are to merge and when we are not to merge. Everyone in the entertainment industry uses a different name than they were born with, and many have used multiple names. Why are some allowed to have separate artist pages, and others have one page but contain aliases and artist credits.
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***Updated for clarity -
When I click the link posted in this thread, I get just one result.
When I click the link posted in the ticket, I get two results.
Interestingly enough, when I click the link in this thread, I get one result, but when I click the refresh button, I get two results. Click refresh again, and it goes back to one result. And so on and so forth with each refresh going between one or two results.
If this is going to be discussed at length, I’d prefer it be in a different topic/thread, so as not to bury the original theme of this thread.
Okay, that’s the same as me.
What I {expected/think we want} is for it to have (in addition to that) the Morlox entry itself indexed, and also have indexed the various events that featured Morlox.
That way, someone searching google for “Morlox <venue-name>” or “Morlox <city-name>” would get those event pages.
Maybe a moderator can come and separate it into separate threads?
But, really, my question actually could tie into #3 in my first post, which stated that Google does not always show similar pages.
You are one person. You have four artist pages. Each page links to the other pages. It becomes a circular issue. It makes sense that google may not include them all.
*EDIT CORRECTION - it is SIX artist pages
For comparison, this is how google indexes discogs.com
Thanks for the explanation.
Can see that not having Morlox/Events or Morlox/Events/specific gig show up on Google significantly reduces Event utility.
A quick simple test of
Morlox bxc
on Bing got no Event either in first 3 pages.
Google for
morlox bxc site:MusicBrainz.org/
produces null result.
BxC being a venue on the Morlox Event page.
Not necessarily an ‘issue’, potentially a ‘feature’ 
It is up to the artist whether their musical personas are the ‘same’ or not. I don’t really want to see someone’s harsh noise side project that they specifically renamed to keep seperate from their pop identity lumped into one discography.
Google wouldn’t necessarily like that either, because someone searching for one on Google probably doesn’t want to see the top albums (or events or start date etc) from the other displayed at the top of their search.
I would be very curious to know if this circular linking could be the cause of this though (doesn’t seem likely though?)
The first part of your statement is what he didn’t want to muddy up the conversation. And that is fine with me.
But for the relevant part regarding search results:
If each of his 4 entries say -
Real name - John Smith
Also performs as - character 1, character 2, character 3
And then there’s not much more written on the first page, that is the sort of the thing that gets considered “duplicate information” and google may not be listing them because of it.
And since each name is a link, that is where it becomes circular. Because you click link one, which takes you to link 2, which takes you back to link 1 which we already said sends you to link 2 - circular.
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While I don’t think that this is the issue here, it does apply, generally, to search results.
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*EDITED WITH NEW INFORMATION
It is six artist pages.
Every website with a menu has internal circular links, I would still be very curious to know if Google sees this as a negative.
Perhaps not having any unique page details is why it’s not showing in the results though, good point.
This seems quite widespread.
eg
I search for
musicbrainz "The Secret Mausoleum Of Mankind: Fetish Miniatures Of The Suicided Races"
expecting to find
etc, etc.
But Google only gives me the work result:
Note, getting Musicbrainz properly Google’d will probably really exacerbate the spam problem we have.
Quick update: We confirmed that a lot of pages are missing and have alerted Google. No response so far, but it looks like several million pages of ours were dropped from the index. Pretty much all but the recording level should be indexed by google, but for some reason it isn’t now.
Stay tuned.