Sitelinks in Google disappearing

[Ed_S]

I have just 4 valid URLs left, apparently. The “Sitelinks searchbox” says about each of them:

1 valid item detected

Valid items are eligible for Google Search’s rich results. Learn more

Here’s a search result for one of those 4 - it has an image, on the Google results page, which I take to be a “rich result”

Google offers a “rich results test” for URLs of your choosing:
Rich Results Test - Google Search Console

I see for one of my supposedly-valid URLs it complains (or notes) that it didn’t find an “image” for the page.

[piffy]

@MarkDoerr

These graphs are of the results of page indexing. Can someone share what the reasons Google gives for their pages not being indexed?

There are circumstances that may make this only an issue for my site, but would be curious if anyone else is seeing anything similar

Site was imported to discourse ~6 months ago

[merefield (Robert)]

I’m going to admit I’m not sure what is going on and why there were so many more that dwindled to a one, but here’s more detail, giving my site starzen as an example:

This seems to be picking out metadata about the search control?

Can someone explain to me why one would expect there to be more than one?

An explanation on what this is for on stackoverflow: seo - What's a `<script type='application/ld+json'>{jsonObj}</script>` in a `head` section do? - Stack Overflow

It kind of suggests the right number is … ONE?

I guess someone could look at the wayback machine or another archive tool and check the population of metadata to see what these once were?

[Ed_S]

Ah, that makes sense - the idea that the site search gadget should be seen (found by google) on the front page, and only the front page. And so the decrease we’re seeing would be Google weeding out all the subpages where it also found the gadget declared.

[merefield (Robert)]

Exactly my thoughts. Seems like a potential and sensible refinement on Google’s side?

[Falco]

Interesting conclusion @merefield. That would mean that the answer to the OP question of

@Falco

So something changed somewhere and Discourse search results, when Sitelinks are rendered, are lacking a search input field

Is

@merefield

Seems like a potential and sensible refinement on Google’s side?

?

[merefield (Robert)]

Yup, so the statistic was wrong and now they’ve fixed it?

Kind of one of these artefacts that was created by Google originally not having to deal with web apps, but finally comes along a web app that shares a single control over almost all pages, then Google cottons on and refines?