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I have rather large problem searching for devexpress help topics. I use text like devexpress +wpf +gridcontrol something and Google and Bing give me loads of irrelevant articles for example for Winforms instead or even asp.net.. and I mean - dozens.

I am not webdeveloper. But I know - a) you can have keywords on your webpages that are used by search engines; b) google and bing have some rudimentary search modifiers.

So my question - if you were developing a website which has large amount of pages for 2 different products (eg WPF and Winforms) and the control names are often very similar or even identical; is it technically possible to implement it in a way where user can use some Google/Bing search modifiers that would definitively hit only pages you want. Like devxpress tag:wpf something?

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  • Is it devexpress or devxpress? And what is that? What are "devexpress help topics"? I can find a domain called devexpress.com but it only shows a "Maintenance in Progress" page. Search help is available on Google and Bing, have you looked at that?
    – KIKO Software
    Nov 11 at 16:52
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    Putting "search strings" in quotes is a common search modifier. From the website, it's basic SEO practices.
    – Trebor
    Nov 11 at 18:30
  • quotes dont help either. google/bing "find" several dozens of links that look similar to google/bing programmers but in fact arent at all similar (there is "grid control" in WPF and Winforms and ASP.NET control suites and there are dozens of articles for each so altogether every search becomes a mess)
    – Boppity Bop
    Nov 12 at 11:15
  • i found the solution - if i use "devexpress inurl:wpf somequery" it does what i needed.. so in fact webdevs can influence search engine by simply keeping different products in urls with clearly marked keys. like "wpf or winforms or aspnet" in this case... and that i figured out looking at the link in the answer for 30 sec.. imagine what a seasoned webdev might find there looking closely..
    – Boppity Bop
    Nov 12 at 11:40

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NO. Webmasters can't definitively do anything to force Googles search to behave a certain way. The best they can do is follow best practices for the moment and provide data optimized in a way that they hope Google will ingest in a way that can easily be found - but as they have no control of the algorithm or Google they can't definitively do anything.

A couple of other comments -

  • The best a webmaster could do is probably to by advertising optimized for certain keywords etc.
  • Unfortunately Google has changed the way (and have often started ignoring altogether) the way modifiers work. What used to be standard best practice for advanced Google Foo is now largely ignored by Google. [ The en****ification of the Internet continuing apace ]. Apparently the "+" modifier was removed in 2011 and "~" in 2013. (see https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/)
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  • actually i found a way reading your link - if i use "inurl:wpf blabla" it gives me what i want. thanks!
    – Boppity Bop
    Nov 12 at 11:37

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