assume you didnt know what panda3d was. now go to google, and try finding it. its pretty hard. I’d expected to be 1st when i search something like ‘python game engine’, ‘python 3d game’ etc
i learnt about panda through a blog post someone has published which listed a number of engines. this was one of them. i have no idea why i cant find a link to this projects site through a google search…
it’s the 1st hit on google and yahoo when you look for “free 3d game engine”, which is how i found it.
Agreed. When I first started thinking about a 3d game written in python a few years ago I found Soya3d. I did a little with it, but this was shortly before the PySoy fork and is probably typical before a fork there was a lot of disagreement and issues. After a while I became disinterested, not because I didn’t want to make a 3d game with python, but because of the state of Soya3d. A while later I went back and found PySoy, and while it has potential there are some things that turn me off. The license they are using sucks. Again I decided I didn’t want to work with it. I again thought about putting something together, so I started searching again. Crystal space, Python-Ogre, Blender, and a few others. It was only after looking through all of those and not getting hooked in that I stumbled on Panda3d. Perhaps my google-fu was off, or things have changed because a quick bit of googling and I’m now seeing Panda3d.
FWIW, googling “python 3d engine” shows panda3d as the second hit. Maybe google is tayloring the results based on previous searches or something?
um, why do you suspect that? I don’t see anything in this thread that would cause one to suspect that.
i must have non-existent google-fu then 
bottom line is, i spent months fiddleing with engines here and there and not once did i come across panda on google. i would have expected panda to be “up there” on searches like
“python 3d game engine”
“python game engine” (actualy, a page about us IS there, but its infact a wiki page listing game engines.)
“python 3d”
in all of the above, i think soya and pysoy both come up on the first page.why arent we there?
Well, it’s the third hit for “3d engine” and second for “python 3d engine”
But when I insert “game” in the search entry, Panda suddenly disappears.
I’ve just added “game” to the entry on the website but I don’t know if it will do any good.
I actually found Panda3D when digging through the engine list on gpwiki.
yea the game part is whats important IMHO.
I found Panda recently by searching through tons of game engines on devmaster.net … its a shame too because I wish I would have known about Panda a lot sooner. The users over there gave Panda a lot of good reviews. I agree with OP though, the term “game engine” and “3D game engines” really need a boost on Google
Google’s PageRank algorithm uses incoming links the most, but the second most important factor for ranking a website is its title. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure Google ignores meta-tags, although Google is pretty secretive about the details. Thus, the title of the Panda homepage ought to be “Panda3D - Free 3D Game Engine” and not just “Panda3D - Free 3D Engine”.
Basically, because the word “game” doesn’t appear prominently on the front page, the word “game” isn’t linked to the Panda3D website.
I’ve just added the word “Game” in the title - let’s see what google does now.
nice 
Good points jhocking, another thing you probably want to do is create an XML sitemap of all the most important pages on the site then go to google webmaster tools and submit it. www.google.com/webmasters/ (youll need to be signed in before you can see the tools) I find it usually takes about 7 days or so for google to index after submitting.
Just that when looking for a panda 3d game engine in the past google never led me to Panda3d, but after reading this thread and doing some searching Panda3d comes up. Sooooo, either I’m using different search terms than in the past, somehow I never saw Panda3d in google results, or google is giving me different results than it did in the past.
i would thing that its just because of the fact that you know what to look for now. you can easily rediscover panda3d. first time around though, you dont even know of its existance… you try terms that might not be the best for panda 3d itself. thats what im thinking anyway, because i certainly didnt see it on google a few weeks either, but i can type in the right query to bring it up on the first page easyly now
It’s not hard to find. Panda3D was developed from the Disney VR studio. More on panda3d’s wikipedia article
Okay, we made it to the first result on “free 3d game engine”, and the ninth on “3d game engine”, the fifth on “3d engine”.
I get entirely nothing on “open-source”, I’ll fix that by sticking that word somewhere on the front page.
That was fast
You might also want to stick the word “Python” somewhere in the front page description. Although Panda does seem to be connected to Python in search results (possibly through links to other pages that mention Python, I’m not sure of the details of how PageRank works,) I don’t see the word anywhere on the front page.
I would suggest inserting this line from the first page of the manual as the second sentence of the first page description, and linking it to the manual’s intro:
Game development with Panda3D usually consists of writing a Python or C++ program that controls the Panda3D library.
That’s a good idea, I’ve just done that.