CMS

[Ruediger Landmann]

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