TL;DR (Summary)
This is a solutions site for the end-of-chapter exercises in A First Course in Bayesian Statistical Methods / 標準 ベイズ統計学 (Japanese edition). I started it during my Master’s degree and still update it, albeit at a very slow pace.
Recently, after just a few updates, the site went from not appearing in Google search results at all to ranking highly. Here’s a memo on what I did 📝.
Motivation for Improvement: “Doesn’t Show Up in Search Results at All”
I put a lot of effort into this site during my Master’s, second only to my thesis, and I thought there would be decent demand from readers of Hoff, “A First Course in Bayesian Statistical Methods”.
However
No matter what keywords I searched for, it absolutely didn’t show up 😭. For example…
hoff bayes exercise標準ベイズ 解答(Japanese for “Standard Bayes Answers”)
Searching Google with terms like these didn’t even list the site on the very last page of the results…
Figure 1: Google search results navigation bar. Apparently, the number of ‘o’s represents the number of pages… I didn’t know that.
It would be one thing if the rank was low, but not even appearing as a candidate seemed strange. I hypothesized, “Maybe the site is too heavy…?” and decided to try optimizing it (making it lighter).
What I Did 🛠️
Specifically, here’s what I did:
- Major Site Structure Change (Optimization/Lightening)
- Before: The homepage contained solutions for all chapters (Chapters 2-10, 54 problems at the time!).
- After: Split the content into separate pages for each exercise problem.
- Basic SEO Measures
- Added
keywordanddescriptionmeta tags to each page. - Set up
robots.txt(Instructions for crawlers 🤖). - Generated and set up
sitemap.xml(Site map 🗺️).
- Added
The Results! A Dramatic Before & After ✨
The effects of the site improvements were clearly reflected in the PageSpeed Insights scores.
| Metric | Before 😱 | After 🚀 | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | 51 | 97 | +46 Points |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 1.4s | 1.0s | -0.4s |
| Total Blocking Time | 4,590ms | 0ms | -4,590ms (!!) |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.195 | 0.011 | -0.184 |
| Speed Index | 2.2s | 1.0s | -1.2s |
| Accessibility | ! | 88 | Errors resolved! |
| SEO | ! | 100 | Now indexable! |
I was amazed that the Total Blocking Time went from 4.5 seconds down to 0 seconds!
The SEO score also previously showed a “Cannot be indexed” error. No wonder it didn’t show up.
Google Search Rankings Skyrocketed Too! 📈
And as for the crucial Google search results…
Figure 2: Search results for “Hoff bayes exercise” (As of May 3, 2025)
Despite being completely invisible before, it now ranks highly for major keywords! What surprised me was how quickly the changes took effect (within a day).
| Search Keyword | Rank (Before) | Rank (After) |
|---|---|---|
Hoff bayes exercise |
Not ranked | 1st 🥇 |
Hoff bayes |
Not ranked | 3rd 🥉 |
標準ベイズ 解答 |
Not ranked | 3rd 🥉 |
標準ベイズ統計学 演習 |
Not ranked | 3rd 🥉 |
標準ベイズ 演習 |
Not ranked | 6th |
標準ベイズ |
Not ranked | Not ranked |
標準ベイズ統計学 |
Not ranked | Not ranked |
Summary and Future Tasks
With these improvements, the site went from not being found in searches at all to ranking highly for many keywords, and I’m glad I did it.
However, there are points for reflection… Since I implemented the optimization (lightening) and SEO measures simultaneously, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly which change had the biggest impact.
Thank you for reading to the end 🙏.