SymPy search results data

[Aaron Meurer]

I just took a look at the Google search console data for Google search
results related to sympy.org domains for October, 2019. Here is the
data for

search terms: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SVFe2Fw42okYy_Q6uTQs64ful--hTsigppWWXDA9bY0/edit?usp=sharing

and

page results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16LKHE9sPRJ5z9GYcYK74Qhn0ABVsBHpivv0pBh1mj68/edit?usp=sharing

There is also some other data but I didn't find it to be very interesting.

Some of the interesting things:

- The documentation page for solvers is the top result. It gets as
much traffic as sympy.org itself. So we should focus on improving this
page. I think it would be good to have some text at the top of the
page that gives a general overview of SymPy solvers. I think a big
reason it is so popular is that people associate the verb "solve" with
a very general thing that doesn't necessarily correspond to
sympy.solve().

- A lot of search results are for old versions of the documentation,
going all the way back to 0.6.7, which is the earliest version that is
there. 0.6.7 was released in 9 1/2 years ago in 2010. I still strongly
believe that we should remove these pages, as they confuse users. I've
had pushback in the past about this, though.

- A lot of searches are for general "symbolic python". That means
people either can't remember the name "sympy" or they don't know about
it but want to see if something like it exists.

If anyone wants more access to the search console let me know.

Aaron Meurer

[David Bailey]

Aaron,

I strongly agree with you that it is all too easy to to searches related to SymPy, and get out of date documentation (I have done this many times!), so I think would be a great help to remove all the obsolete documentation. Presumably there is some way to remove the pages so that GOOGLE searches land gracefully on the latest documentation.

David

[Aaron Meurer]

We tried various things before, but they obviously haven't worked.
Unless someone knows something we can do that we aren't presently, I
think we should remove them. I actually think we should remove them
anyway, as we don't even support older versions.

Aaron Meurer

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[EKW]

I will add that it is also easy to get confusing search results for mpmath vs SymPy functions, especially given that most of them have the same names.

[Aaron Meurer]

I have a pull request to remove old versions of the docs at
https://github.com/sympy/sympy_doc/pull/33.

Aaron Meurer

On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 11:09 AM EKW <etk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I will add that it is also easy to get confusing search results for mpmath vs SymPy functions, especially given that most of them have the same names.
>>
>>

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