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Misadventures in SEO: How to self-sabotage your documentation

Documentation is a critical feature in the developer experience of any product. When your docs are sparse, confusing, or nonexistent, developers can't use your product. What if your docs are great, but no one can find them? I assure you, from personal experience — you'll end up with frustration all around. From the docs team who can't figure out what's happening, to the users who can't find anything, to the support team that must memorize the entire documentation structure in order to help users. In this session we'll look at my team's misadventures in the SEO of our product documentation. Our best intentions were outdone by our misunderstanding of SEO concepts, and we accidentally eliminated the ability to search our documentation. It's been a difficult hole to crawl out of — and we're still not fully out of it! I'll share the steps we've taken that have helped, the steps that haven't helped, and how we're applying this learning to our other documentation sites. You'll leave with a better understanding of SEO, and how it applies to your product's documentation.