Improve how our results are shown on Google

[davidfischer]

Once we've added more structured data to our site (#5208), we can optimize how these things are presented.

At the most basic level, this might be just identifying parts of our site like breadcrumbs to the page shown on Google or we could relate pages (eg. the project page is related to the documentation and the github/BB repo).

However, there are other nice features we could add. For example, Google already presents a search box for Read the Docs (see screenshot) but it uses Google search rather than Read the Docs' internal search. We could let Google know about our search as follows:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "WebSite",
  "url": "https://readthedocs.org/",
  "potentialAction": {
    "@type": "SearchAction",
    "target": "https://readthedocs.org/search/?q={search_term_string}",
    "query-input": "required name=search_term_string"
  }
}
</script>

More advanced features include optimizing quick results or having carousels that we have more direct control of. These include features like AMP where Google actually hosts/syndicates the content.

Screenshot

How RTD shows up in search results

[agjohnson]

I could see pointing project docs to the in doc site search being fairly useful, though i'd still probably wager that most folks end up at our docs after a specific google search.

For example, if we point google subsearch to the in doc search, i could see a small amount of traffic navigating to the project X documentation by: searching "project X docs" -> typing search term in subsearch -> finding result in in-doc search result page.

In chrome, I always autocomplete type docs.readthedocs.io, hit tab, and then do subsearch this way. Apparently google just knows how to make this work.

We could pretty easily include this in our dashboard templates now, to activate our dashboard search from google hits like this. Again, I don't think many folks at all would find docs by going -> RTD -> RTD global search -> project X documentation, let alone searching google for RTD first. I personally want to divest from building our dashboard search, in-doc search is where people are actually searching.

There is certainly a lot of information we could output as part of a knowledge graph/rich result search result on a per-project basis though links into API docs, project metadata, project logo, project active versions, etc.