Epic Developer Community Site Updates - Docs, SEO, & Search

General Announcements
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Hi all, a couple of Epic Dev Community site updates:

Unreal Engine 4 Documentation

Unreal Engine 4.27 documentation pages are now accessible via the Epic Dev Community, migrated from the previous documentation site. This change helps to address SEO challenges where the UE4 documentation site often surfaced higher than the new UE5 documentation pages.

In March, we migrated all the UE5.x documentation to the Epic Dev Community, and left the UE4.x documentation on the old site to eventually become a legacy site—the same way we handled documentation for the UE3 to UE4 transition 10 years ago.

While UE3 had few documentation pages that were also present in UE4, UE4’s documentation is very similar to UE5’s, leading to search engines trying to figure out what to do with the duplicate content. In hindsight, we realized the best strategy would be to move the UE4 documentation as well, and are therefore now moving UE4.27 documentation over.

As part of this rollover, 4.26 documentation will be deprecated entirely.

SEO and Search

In addition to migrating 4.27 pages to improve SEO, we’ve made a variety of SEO changes to ensure that it is as easy as possible to find what you are looking for.

We’ve made several dozen changes related to technical SEO, such as service side rendering, sitemaps, robot.txt, and meta tags. And we’ve worked to prioritize the latest engine version in English in search results.

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On top of that, we’ve been working on the integrated Epic Dev Community search. The updated vector-based search is able to handle full sentence search queries, mistakes, and errors.

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This is still very much work in progress, and we welcome all of your feedback. If you notice unexpected search results, please let us know in this thread and we will look into it.

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Please undo this and archive everything to archive.org first; I couldn’t find the old release notes and they weren’t on archive.org. It’s going to break every link on the web to old UE stuff.

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  1. I go at the top of this very forum page I am reading, and I click documentation (one of multiple ways to access it):
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  2. On the documentation site, I click the only search box available (aside from the category tree filter) and I type in UPROPERTY to find the property specifiers:
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  3. I hit enter and the results are still complete BS:
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  4. I need to explicitly click “Documentation” category every single time I perform the search to get relevant, documentation results:
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In which universe is it even remotely acceptable that a search box on subsection of a site solely dedicated to documentation not only doesn’t search documentation by default, but when explicitly set up to search documentation, can’t even remember the search setup until the very next search? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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i like

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Awesome! I had been wondering why it would always default to 4.27 docs and this makes sense.
Was pretty surprised there weren’t cookies or any cached values account side defaulting it to 5 but this solves that anyways (I got pretty good about being actively aware of what styling the page elements wrere and picking up which version documentation i was on :sweat_smile:)

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Marketplace links into the questions sections are getting messed up, seeming to try to apply the latest version 5.4 engine documentation redirector to them.

A popup like this comes up and it redirects to the empty 5.4 documentation page off of the marketplace:

“* Error loading document: No document redirect for path en-us/unreal-engine/marketplace/en-US/product/[product name]/questions and version 5.4”

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The search “in this topic” functionality no longer works. Instead of searching the thread you’re in, it submits it as a global search.

This thing:
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Not sure when it started but I noticed it this week

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Many pages are missing. I prefer the old document site.

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Hey everyone, these have been flagged with the team and we’ll be looking into them. Thanks for the notes!

Do you have a couple sample links that aren’t working for you?

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I am signed in (based on my forum thumbnail showing and being able to post):
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But the button right above still says “sign in”, and when I click it, it lands me to https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US which indicates I am already logged in:
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:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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We’ve now updated this behavior—when you search from the Documentation pages, it’ll automatically apply the Documentation filter to isolate your results.

Please give this a try and let us know if that flow helps!

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Yes, I can confirm it does, significantly. :+1:

For example searching for class specifier:

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…now returns relevant result and the desired result as the very first one.

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Both seem to have gotten fixed, an old release notes link now redirects to the dev site one and the marketplace one I was trying ( https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/shooting-range-01/questions ) no longer redirects to a generic 5.4 documentation page (unless it is something like they updated for 5.4 and that makes it no longer trigger the broken redirect).

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Too many C++ pages are missing. Today I cannot find anything fore FCriticalSection.

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Here’s an example that seems broken:

If you visit this page:

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/remote-procedure-calls-in-unreal-engine

The dropdown on the left shows engine versions back to 4.27. These type of dropdowns in the docs used to mean that any versions listed in the dropdown had a version of the page. Now if you select 4.27 it boots you out to this page instead:

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/networking-and-multiplayer?application_version=4.27

And your back button won’t take you back to where you were reading.

When you click the back button, it leaves you on the networking-and-multiplayer wrong url but does a refresh of the page, and leaves the forward button greyed out. If you click the back button again, it still leaves you at networking-and-multiplayer wrong url but now the forward button is available. And if you click the forward button, you are still stuck at the unrelated networking-and-multiplayer page.

Aside from the back button navigation fixes, if the dropdown is now more of a global version preference selector, I think it would be good to still have some kind of visual indication that there is a version of the current page available even if you can still select versions where one isn’t available, like make all the engine versions in the dropdown be in bold if there is a version of the current page. And when a version without the current page redirects you somewhere random, it could have something like a popup saying there wasn’t a version of the page you tried to reach instead of just taking you to a random place further up the documentation heirarchy with no indication why you landed there.

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FWIW Google results seem to have broken down for me with these changes on all searches. When I search a c++ function name or blueprint node it almost never gives the docs anymore and will often just pull up random forum posts that mentioned the same keyword, even with exact quotes over the c++ identifier.

For instance if I search "TArray" ue5 I get as the first result:

https://community.gamedev.tv/t/ue5-c-how-to-use-tarrays/204903

Second result:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/create-an-array-with-c/608669

Third result (dev.epicgames so looks at a glance like maybe official, but then it’s just a community member tutorial entirely on YouTube):

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/yym8/unreal-engine-6-arrays-and-tarray-introduction-to-c-unreal-5-3-c

An on and on. Nowhere on the entire first page of Google results gives me the member functions for TArrays like the old documentation pages that would always be first.

Edit to add: If you search any of the method names of TArray, you never get this page that actually documents them:

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/API/Runtime/Core/Containers/TArray

It’s always snippit examples, forum discussion and videos and never the actual documentation.

The blueprint and editor exposed stuff is all gone from search engines now too. If you see a word in the Details panel and search it, it now never pulls up the documentation.

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I think I see the issue, https://dev.epicgames.com/robots.txt leads to different sitemaps, and some are broken. The cpp api one linked inside https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/sitemap.xml is broken and doesn’t load:

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/api/documentation/sitemaps/unreal_engine/ue_cpp_api_external/sitemap_1.xml

And the whole sitemap file at https://dev.epicgames.com/sitemap seems to show as corrupted xml compared to the other sitemaps (the others also have .xml extensions and this one is delivered with the wrong content type for xml if you go into chrome dev tools and check the content type vs the other .xml ones)

(edit: now the cpp API one is loading for me)

And another example I just ran into, this time not the autogenerated C++ or blueprint node docs:

If I search Google for “unreal oodle network compression,” the primary documentation page on it is nowhere in the first five pages of results: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/oodle-network

Another example: search for “unreal alembic file importer”; none of the first pages of results give what you would expect as the first result: Alembic File Importer in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.4 Documentation | Epic Developer Community

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I can’t figure out how to search individual threads. The global search works but the individual thread search is nowhere to be found. There are some long threads such as lumen one and I now have to result to google to search it.

The regular thread search works in the vanilla discourse. Why doesn’t it work here?

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Can you please finally do something about the subcategory clutter. I just wanted to read some threads about the new Fab/Quixel changes, but when I got to Quixel subcategory, my visual field was immediately overwhelmed and I had almost no idea what I am looking at:

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There’s just such a brutal amount of visual noise with all the pinned threads, the forum post previews being such a strong font and all the post flair icons that it takes many seconds for one to even realize where to start reading the page from.

It has happened to me several times already where I wanted to look around for some posts to read but as soon as I visited any subcategory, I just closed the tab because my brain got instantly overloaded.

What’s important in the subcategory view - the thread titles - get completely drowned in all of the surrounding elements.

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Search is still messed up after months.

Here’s another example:

Search google for: unreal clang cross-compile toolchain

Nothing relevant from the docs comes up, random forum stuff and youtube videos on the first several pages of google results.

It used to send you right this that would give you the latest version of the cross-compile toolchain:

Whole huge sections of the documentation have been removed from Google/Bing/etc. The next training updates of large language models are probably going to be blind to most of the unreal docs if they respect robots.txt and the broken sitemaps.

Again, here’s an example of a broken sitemap, for all the C++ documentation: https://dev.epicgames.com/community/api/documentation/sitemaps/unreal_engine/ue_cpp_api_external/sitemap_1.xml

Times out with 504 from cloudflare. Several of the sitemaps do not have this issue. Main documentation for tons of features and APIs are totally removed from search engines for several months now! Has anyone looked into it from Epic?

@Hourences are you guys not seeing the huge traffic drop off? Maybe traffic overall is up because people have to go through the documentation search directly, but that means you don’t get to take advantage of Google’s relevance stuff that would put useful forum stuff along side the documentation when you searched for something.