Module discoverability / SEO

Created on 19 March 2025, 21 days ago

Problem/Motivation

This module is massively useful, but seems to be impossible to find on e.g. Google if you do not specifically search for "entity usage" despite being a relatively popular module.

The project page is pretty detailed but also seems to have a lot of information that most developers would just skim through before deciding that the module already has 55k installs, so why not just install it and see what it does? Meanwhile it seems to be completely lacking in information that would aid in actually discovering the module.

Example Google searches that do not bring up this module:

  • "drupal show entity back references" brings up a module with 10 installs
  • "drupal display node usage from entity reference field" links to a sandbox module
  • "drupal list media usage" brings up the "Entity Usage (light)" module, which links back to this one, but which itself only has 28 installs
  • "drupal node usage entity reference list"
  • "drupal show content usage"
  • "drupal list entity references"

At the very least, the project page does not mention Nodes or Taxonomy Terms, and only mentions Media in passing.

I believe that in order to make this module a first-page Google result, the project page would need to be edited to at least explicitly mention the most common scenarios for using this module for Nodes, Taxonomy Terms, and Media, if not rewritten completely to convey what the module does in a more general, readable manner. The README can be updated to address any details that get removed from the project page.

✨ Feature request
Status

Active

Version

2.0

Component

Documentation

Created by

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States caesius

Live updates comments and jobs are added and updated live.
Sign in to follow issues

Merge Requests

Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @caesius
  • πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΈSpain marcoscano Barcelona, Spain

    Thanks for pointing this out. True, the text on the project page is likely inherited from when the project was just an idea to expand what core's file_usage does... :)

    Would you be up for creating a first pass at refactoring the page + readme file?

    Thanks!

  • πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States caesius

    caesius β†’ changed the visibility of the branch 8.x-2.x to hidden.

  • Merge request !132Resolve #3514169 "Module discoverability" β†’ (Merged) created by caesius
  • Pipeline finished with Success
    9 days ago
    Total: 301s
    #462019
  • πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States caesius

    I created an MR to move README.txt to README.md (so as to support hyperlinks) and added a blurb at the top that I think could be added to the project page to make the module more "discoverable."

    Meanwhile, the project page could probably be trimmed down to remove the "How it works" section. If someone gets stuck and needs more specific instructions or specifications they can follow the link to the README (which should be updated to .md instead of .txt on the project page) -- but my experience with the module was that I didn't need to thoroughly read the project page to understand how to configure it; it was immediately intuitive.

    I'm not a fan of the bulleted list of "tracking methods" but I'm not sure if removing it would help or harm SEO when trying to find a "node usage module" or the like. My hunch though is that spamming the word "entity" so many times would make a search engine assume that the module is wholly unrelated to nodes, taxonomies, etc., and the list is way more specific than what I think most devs would use the module for, so it can probably just be preserved in the README.

  • πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States caesius
  • Pipeline finished with Skipped
    7 days ago
    #464298
  • πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΈSpain marcoscano Barcelona, Spain

    Thanks for contributing!
    I have merged the PR, and tweaked the project page to include some end-user scenarios that include some of the terms you mentioned above.
    I still think the relationship methods list is important since that may be very relevant to developers reading the project page, so they can know the extent of the possibilities of the module.

    Thanks again!

Production build 0.71.5 2024