In another thread I’ve been showing my children’s magazine made in GDevelop. It’s part of our small business creating personalised children’s books I am working on with my partner, Amanda. GDevelop is a central part of our business, as along with the magazine, we used GDevelop to build the personalised book creators and book previews.
In building our ecommerce website we have been attempting to optimise it for Search Engine Optimisation (we haven’t the funds to pay for advertising).
My question is does a GDevelop game deployed on a website flag internally for SEO?
I understand that GDevelop, when output, is made of HTML and javascript which presumably does get noted by the search engines.
It’s hard to explain my question. Put it another way… as I understand SEO, Google can see when a visitor is on a site, how long they interact with it, which pages they look at, etc. If they go into a GDevelop game, will their time in that game be picked up by Google, or from Google’s perspective are they in a ‘black hole’? From what I have read if someone is on a page for too long a time, Google records it as a ‘bounce’.
Apologies if I haven’t explained myself very well, or if I posted this in the wrong forum area.
Only games exported on https://liluo.io/ have meta tags for SEO: title, description, image.
I think here you talk about Google Analytics, If you use their services you have to include a tracking number on your website.
For HTML5 games that you can export with GDevelop there is no meta tag included, it’s up to you to include your tags manually. But bot from Google parse the whole pages, and understand what are the classic html tags, like <Title>, and we set the project name in this tag, so you could find the page on your tracking tools with the project name.
We cannot provide more help about Google services, but if you notice change todo we could consider adds more tag.
Your project is really cute, we could feature the project on your social media. If you’re interested you can send me a private message on this forum
SEO is a very complex topic, it can be a full-time job to fully master it. As far as the main question goes: no, GDevelop games are not black holes and can be found by search engines.
If you have your own website, I recommend adding files like a sitemap.xml, robots.txt, registering it on the Google & Bing search consoles (that will also allow you to get insights about how people find your site through Google ), and adding meta tags to your HTML page.
If you want to automate this last process, and do not mind using the command line and a bit of code, you can use GDExporter (a small custom exporter with plugins of mine). Here is how I did it on my little project cri.quest:
Meta tags:
GDExporter configuration:
NPM configuration:
It is quite technical though, so it would be fair to do it manually too.
Thank you @Bouh and @arthuro555 for your advice. We will certainly look into implementing it. As you say, Arthuro, SEO is a monster topic. We can’t do it all but we’ve been following a couple of excellent Udemy courses that are guiding us through figuring out 80% of the SEO we can implement to get some traction, we hope!
