This week, and also a bit in the previous time, I have been experimenting with how to get proper SEO on the Yarn website. The first important part was making sure that the detail pages actually get rendered by Google. This is done by making sure the proper polyfills are in place (I used polyfill.io for that, as well as making sure that the meta tags are updated properly.
This, together with some other changes on the Yarn site had a very positive impact on the traffic, which is now hovering around 100k daily searches as well as a big jump in page views, and google search result clicks.
The sitemap generator is available as a project on GitHub, with already contributions from Mika and Vincent, who are great colleagues.
The Googlebot now sees both as Googlebot and as “how your visitors see it the same! Which leads to hundreds of thousands of Google results for the detail pages. Right now they’re not linked from much places yet, so they don’t arrive high on the results, but that will normally change with time.
I also experimented with jsdoc and how to maybe make it available as a service for Yarn, but there are a lot of inconsistencies between projects, so that is not going to be possible soon.