Why Croquet Queensland is hard to find on Google

A few members got in touch recently with the same worry. Search Google for "croquet queensland", and the association's own website no longer comes up near the top. It sits well down the list, or it doesn't show at all.

They're right. So I checked it properly.

On 19 June I ran the searches and recorded what came back. For "croquet queensland", the main site, www.croquetqld.org, did not appear in the top ten at all.

A search for "croquet queensland". The results that come back are Facebook, our Club Hub forum and our HOOPLA news site. The main croquetqld.org site isn't among them. (These are Google's results, captured through a privacy search tool, to get non-personalised data.)

What did appear is the interesting part. Our own news site, HOOPLA, showed up. So did our Club Hub forum. So did a string of individual clubs: Merthyr, East Brisbane, Toombul, Stephens. The state body was being outranked by its own clubs and its own sub-sites.

The first thing to say is the reassuring one. The site is not broken. It is not banned, blocked, or hidden from Google. Google can read it perfectly well, and the pages are sitting in Google's index. Being readable was never the problem.

The problem is what Google finds when it reads the page.

The main site runs on a platform called RevolutioniseSport. It's a shared system used by many sporting bodies and clubs in our part of the world. It is built for membership and administration. It was not built to be found on Google.

The public page it produces is thin. The same one-line description sits on every page, so Home, News and History all look identical to a search engine. There are no machine-readable labels that tell Google what a page is actually about. The homepage carries very little real text, and its headings are just the names of widgets, "Latest news" and "Upcoming events", rather than what's on the page.

The current croquetqld.org homepage, thin and generic to a search engine.

Here is the part that proves the point. Croquet Australia runs the very same platform, on the very same template, and it ranks first for its name.

Croquet Australia's homepage. The same platform, the same template as ours, yet it ranks first for "croquet australia".

The difference isn't the page. The two pages are near enough identical. The difference is competition. Nobody else is fighting for the words "croquet australia", so even a thin page wins by default. "Croquet queensland" is a crowded search. Active club sites compete for it, and so does our own, richer news site. When the field around a thin page gets stronger, the thin page slips.

That's worth sitting with for a moment. Part of the reason the old page fell away is that the rest of Queensland croquet got better online.

Our main homepage, we can say for certain, is structurally weak, and a weak page is always fragile.

So what's the fix?

It's a well-worn path, and other sports have already walked it.

Hockey Australia and Badminton Australia put a modern public website out the front, and kept RevolutioniseSport behind it just for membership and admin. Their rankings are fine.

Hockey Australia. A modern public homepage out the front, with RevolutioniseSport kept behind it for admin.

We can build to that standard. HOOPLA! (this site), our news site at news.croquetqld.org, is exactly that kind of modern, readable site, and it already outranks our own front page on Google.

A front page that should be the gold standard, twenty-five years old, now sits below a news site only weeks old. In search, age counts for nothing; being well built counts for everything.

HOOPLA, news.croquetqld.org. Our own modern site, already outranking the main croquetqld.org front page.

A homepage is not about vanity. Being easy to find is how a curious beginner stumbles onto the game, and how a member chasing a fixture or a policy actually reaches us. That's the job of a website. The current CAQ website does not do that.

The full findings, with the evidence behind all of this, are set out in the review I prepared for the committee: Why Croquet Queensland is hard to find online (PDF).