On 06/05/2010 03:23 AM, Paul W. Frields wrote: > > I don't consider myself "outside" but the most glaring problem we have > now is what has been induced by changing the entire site structure: > > * Broken links from Google that bring the user back to a front page > > * An embedded search that brings users to Google, which doesn't work > and often brings the user back... (etc.) > > Some of this might change as Google re-indexes content, but we really > do need to keep a careful eye on how the user experience of finding > our docs content is working. > > One of the new features of Publican 2.0 that I haven't mentioned yet is that it creates an XML sitemap for search engine bots to crawl. You can find d.fp.o.'s sitemap here: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/Sitemap I've fed this to Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and they're all slowly re-indexing the site. The map now contains a little over 2,000 URLs and at the time of writing, Google has crawled about 350 of them. The dilemma we face is the decision of when to turn off the 404 redirect. For the sake of all the existing links scattered around the net (both on the Fedora Project site and off it), we'd want to postpone this as far as possible. On the other hand, any bot attempting to verify that link gets a page served up and probably concludes that the link is valid; I suspect that if these links 404ed, they'd start to evaporate from search results. Given that existing links around the net are pointing to (at most recent) the F12 versions of docs, there will be no need to keep the 404 redirect in place past October; however, if we want to start allowing dead links to 404 out rather than poison search results, maybe we should bring that date forward? The sooner we do this, the sooner search will start working properly... Cheers Rudi -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
