Remove duplicate plugin entries from Google

Elgg / community_plugins

Elgg community plugin repository

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Remove duplicate plugin entries from Google #27

Open ewinslow opened 11 years ago

ewinslow commented 11 years ago

Currently when you search on Google you end up getting all of a plugin's releases listed as separate results. This is not a great experience. Instead, you probably just want the canonical page for that plugin, which would then tell you the recommended release or allow you to browse further releases.

Recommend changing URL structure to:

/plugins/:plugin_guid -- Plugin profile page (allows direct download of recommended release)
/plugins/:plugin_guid/releases -- List of all releases with direct download links

Each release should not even have it's own profile URL, methinks, though we may still need it so people can get to the comments.

beck24 commented 10 years ago

The duplicate content will likely be removed with my major update here An additional thing that might be worth thinking about is adding canonical metatags to the release pages pointing back to the project page

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

thoughts?

ewinslow commented 10 years ago

Canonical metatags feels strange because they really are different resources (i.e. the download button will give you different things. The discussion is also different.

Excluding them from index entirely also seems wrong, though, because the release notes and comments might still be valuable.

I am really not sure what the right answer is. Leaning towards blocking indexing, but only slightly.

ewinslow commented 10 years ago

If we're removing project description from the release page, is that not going to be enough for Google to start doing the right thing?

ewinslow commented 10 years ago

Yea, excluding from index feels better because we just want to funnel everyone through the main project page so they don't hit an old release page by accident. They can still get to the relevant release notes/discussion, just not directly from SERP.

So that's my thought. We should use robots.txt or some kind of metatag to block indexing of project release pages.

beck24 commented 10 years ago

ok, yeah that was my original idea but I thought indexing of the comments might be useful. Why don't we see how the indexing changes after this is applied given the removal of duplicate content, then down the road if it's still an issue we can block indexing.

ewinslow commented 10 years ago

SGTM

On Sun, Nov 23, 2014, 11:25 AM Matt Beckett notifications@github.com wrote:

ok, yeah that was my original idea but I thought indexing of the comments might be useful. Why don't we see how the indexing changes after this is applied given the removal of duplicate content, then down the road if it's still an issue we can block indexing.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/Elgg/community_plugins/issues/27#issuecomment-64130639 .