SEO: Broken Google search for game by title

[salty-horse]

Searching for site:ifdb.org "Sir Bronte" (Link), the first result is the cover art page for the game: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?coverart&id=hv1lft5x9lifi0j8&version=1&ldesc
(From that page, you can't get to the game page)

EDIT: Correct link without typo: site:ifdb.org "Sir Brante" (Link)

None of the other results lead to the actual game page. They're all just random search pages, or member profiles.

This is the game page: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=hv1lft5x9lifi0j8

The game title is "Жизнь и страдания господина Бранте | The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante".

[dfabulich]

I think this bug is filed a bit strangely; you should probably be searching for "Sir Brante" not "Sir Bronte" (But Google autocorrects on your behalf).

But the point stands: if you do search for site:ifdb.org "Sir Brante" it shows the cover art but not the game itself.

I went to Google Search Console, and it shows that the page is "not indexed." I tested the URL with the live URL tester and it worked fine.

Sir Brante has no reviews, and doesn't appear in any polls or any competitions. Its title is a mishmash of languages. The only place Google has ever seen a link to it was on a 404 page. I think it's quite understandable that Google might worry that this page is junk.

If this game is important to you, consider posting a review of it.

https://search.google.com/search-console/inspect?resource_id=sc-domain%3Aifdb.org&id=oXtpOFnkYFspkRglM0zJpw

[salty-horse]

Sorry, the Bronte/Brante was my typo, depite remembering I should be careful about it :/

Should there be a sitemap that lists all the games? (and maybe a few other important types, like contests?)
A game should be searchable even if it has no reviews. (For the record, I found out about this one from a podcast, which led me to the Steam page, and then I looked it up in IFDB. It has 2,700+ English reviews on Steam.)

[dfabulich]

The screenshot shows that Google had already discovered and crawled the URL (as recently as May 8), but decided not to "index" the URL, i.e. they crawled it, and they said, "This page looks like junk!" and discarded it.

Should there be a sitemap that lists all the games?

Sitemaps can help Google discover and crawl pages, but they won't make Google decide that a page isn't junk.

A game should be searchable even if it has no reviews.

Tell that to Google! Google is less and less in the business of indexing every single thing they can find, especially since LLMs came on the scene.

[salty-horse]

Maybe a sitemap can convince Google that a page is more important...? Or help solve the issue I mentioned in #1393 where searching by author name isn't improving the results?

I understand their internals are vague on purpose, but in general IFDB search results on Gogole are not good, and I wonder if there's something the site can do to improve it in general. It's very odd that it decides to index "deep" into search results pages, and not game pages.