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I'm curious if anyone has any insight into something: Google seems to have recently changed their algorithm, and now Github repos have basically disappeared from the search results.

If I want to try and get a repo to show up on Google again, does anyone have any suggestions for how I might optimize my repo's home page?

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Publish a simple Github project page explaining your project and linking to the repository. You have much more control over the content there (because it's a static HTML page) than you do over Github's repository indexes.

For what it's worth, I still see Github repos in Google search results. e.g. A search for 'nodejs github' brings up the the node.js Github repo as the first result. It's possible that Google have changed their algorithm in a way that affects these pages, but they certainly haven't removed them altogether.

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  • No, not removed, but (from what I'm used to) badly jumbled them. For instance if you search "CanCan" you used to get ryanb/cancan as a top result, now it's nowhere. If you refine to say "CanCan rails" or "CanCan github" you start to see it but mostly other pages that are linked to the main page instead of the main page itself. Kind of odd. Thanks for the suggestion though, that could help.
    – Andrew
    Jun 22, 2011 at 19:33
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    @Andrew This is probably your best(ish) option. As with everything Google-related, you're better off making your content as good as possible and letting them do their job rather than trying to force them do anything. Google adjust their rankings, and what affects those rankings, all the time, and any tricks you pull could suddenly become ineffective later. When you also factor in that almost everybody is getting results that are customized to some degree, it's difficult to even have this discussion because others might not be seeing the effect as much as you.
    – Su'
    Jun 23, 2011 at 3:33

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