Just something I noticed with a recommended Google search last night:

https://imgur.com/bU5SvGR
https://imgur.com/yqfHkx4

All the cool new languages have their logo show up on Google listings like that. Which I assumed were just scraped from Wikipedia. D does not. Following the rabbit hole, it turns out that Google is preferring a screenshot of a code-completion plugin for some random text editor.

(inb4 "it's not random" - yes it is, it's for KDE and thus caters to a minority of a vast minority. And is also beside the point here.)

So not being well versed in SEO, does anyone have an idea of how to go about fixing this?

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 09:41:13 UTC, Ethan wrote:
> So not being well versed in SEO, does anyone have an idea of how to go about fixing this?

It looks like it simply provides the top image used in the google image search ranking.

How to fix it? Dunno, get people to link to the D wikipedia entry.

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 12:26:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 09:41:13 UTC, Ethan wrote:
>> So not being well versed in SEO, does anyone have an idea of how to go about fixing this?
>
> It looks like it simply provides the top image used in the google image search ranking.
>
> How to fix it? Dunno, get people to link to the D wikipedia entry.

Actually, it looks like they use more than one strategy.  I don't exactly know why they use the wikipedia icon for Ada, but it has very high ranking.

But the Swift icon from wikipedia is completely different. In that case they appear to use a high resolution icon from the home page.  Perhaps <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="https://developer.apple.com/swift/images/swift-touch-icon.png" />.

So first step would be to add links to high resolution images on the homepage. Then perhaps try to increase the visibility of hubs like dlang.org and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language) ?

It is hard to tell exactly what heuristics google use unless they publish it,  but those heuristics also change over time...

Besides, they might have people hand pick icons for the most notable entries.

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 12:40:57 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Besides, they might have people hand pick icons for the most notable entries.

Perhaps not. Go-lang has the same issue and one would think that Google would have added that as a special case, but apparently not. The go lang website also does not provide <link rel="apple-touch-icon" >, so that seems to be one factor.

Best bet seems to be to add high resolution icon to home page and increase ranking of home page.

Perhaps the correlation with Wikipedia is incidental because Wikipedia generally has very high ranking. I don't know.

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 12:52:06 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Perhaps the correlation with Wikipedia is incidental because Wikipedia generally has very high ranking. I don't know.

Perhaps the correlation with Wikipedia is because that second screenshot explicitly states it's languages as mentioned on Wikipedia.

Google got its wires crossed here, and we can fix it with some SEO. So let's stick to solutions instead of multiple "I don't know" posts here please.

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 13:05:44 UTC, Ethan wrote:
> Google got its wires crossed here, and we can fix it with some SEO. So let's stick to solutions instead of multiple "I don't know" posts here please.

Well, that is how SEO is done. You look for correlations and formulate a hypothesis.

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 13:05:44 UTC, Ethan wrote:
> On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 12:52:06 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Perhaps the correlation with Wikipedia is incidental because Wikipedia generally has very high ranking. I don't know.
>
> Perhaps the correlation with Wikipedia is because that second screenshot explicitly states it's languages as mentioned on Wikipedia.

To make it simple:

1.) there is weak correlation between wikipedia and the images chosen

2.) there is strong correlation between high resolution icons on the home page and the images chosen

3.) there is correlation between high image ranking and images chosen

There is no point in trying more extensive SEO before you have tried 2.) and resubmitted the site to Google for processing.

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 13:24:53 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> There is no point in trying more extensive SEO before you have tried 2.) and resubmitted the site to Google for processing.

Ok, so having looked a bit more on this. The Swift icon is most likely picked up from one of two meta-tags, my guess is Open Graph.

<meta property="og:image" content="https://developer.apple.com/swift/images/swift-og.png" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://developer.apple.com/swift/images/swift-og.png" />

C# is a nonlogo taken from code.visualstudio.com
Crystal is a nonlogo taken from medium.com
matlab is a nonlogo taken from mathworks.com
R is a nonlogo taken from revolution-computing.typepad.com

Rust is a logo taken from wikipedia.
Java is a logo taken from wikipedia.
C++ is a logo taken from wikipedia

Python is a logo taken from python.rs
Kotlin is a logo taken from pbs.twimg.com

So no clear pattern, site ranking seems to be dominating, perhaps except for the python.rs case.

Anyway, it is not completely unlikely that they use machine learning to find correlation between imagery and mentions of the programming language (by weighting and ranking) to determine the icon. Then select the most typical image.

But still, your best bet is to start by providing high resolution square icon perhaps as an open graph meta data link in addition to an icon link. You have to start with what you have some hope of influencing with little effort. Your best bet is to provide structured data in the formats that Google has stated public support for, as a start.

Anyway, if they use weighted algorithms then there is no clear answer to what you have to do to get over the threshold.

On 5/16/2019 2:41 AM, Ethan wrote:
> Just something I noticed with a recommended Google search last night:
> 
> https://imgur.com/bU5SvGR
> https://imgur.com/yqfHkx4
> 
> All the cool new languages have their logo show up on Google listings like that. Which I assumed were just scraped from Wikipedia. D does not. Following the rabbit hole, it turns out that Google is preferring a screenshot of a code-completion plugin for some random text editor.

Checking several, there is no consistency about where the images are pulled from.

On Thursday, 16 May 2019 at 16:33:12 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/16/2019 2:41 AM, Ethan wrote:
>> Just something I noticed with a recommended Google search last night:
>> 
>> https://imgur.com/bU5SvGR
>> https://imgur.com/yqfHkx4
>> 
>> All the cool new languages have their logo show up on Google listings like that. Which I assumed were just scraped from Wikipedia. D does not. Following the rabbit hole, it turns out that Google is preferring a screenshot of a code-completion plugin for some random text editor.
>
> Checking several, there is no consistency about where the images are pulled from.

Right, no simple consistency, but the languages which were assigned non-logo images had in common that they displayed images of source-code.

So it is not unlikely that Google, when it lacks other information, looks for similar-looking images that are displayed on pages which cover the topic.

However, Google Search formally does support the display of logos for organizations as structured data (schema.org).