Gitpod dashboard messes with website SEO

[jankeromnes]

Bug description

As reported on Twitter (thanks Michel!), Gitpod's dashboard is now the first result you get when you search "gitpod" on Google:

And unfortunately, the dashboard landing page is not SEO-optimized at all (see "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.")

This is not a good SEO situation for Gitpod.

Steps to reproduce

1. Search for "gitpod" on Google

Workspace affected

No response

Expected behavior

We have two options to fix this:

1. Fix the SEO of Gitpod's dashboard, and align things like title, description, etc. with the Gitpod website

2. Prevent the Google Search crawler from indexing the dashboard at all (might a bit heavy-handed, as some pages might actually be relevant for searches like "manage Gitpod environment variables" -- however, we could decide that we only want users to find documentation pages, and not the app pages)

Example repository

No response

Anything else?

No response

[jankeromnes]

Update: We've decided to go with 2:

2. Prevent the Google Search crawler from indexing the dashboard at all

At least today it makes sense as we don't have any public pages in dashboard yet.

Source: Slack (internal)

This could be achieved with a noindex meta tag or HTTP response header: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/block-indexing

[jankeromnes]

I think this is a quick fix. Jumping on it as a quick break from #8041 😛

[geropl]

@jankeromnes Once done, please check with the other seo issues and close/adjust if there is an overlap. :pray:

[jankeromnes]

@jankeromnes Once done, please check with the other seo issues and close/adjust if there is an overlap. 🙏

Good idea! Done ✅

[geropl]

Still seems to be the case, see slack.

[jankeromnes]

I believe this is now resolved (at least in private browsing / when logged out) 🎉 :

---

(Although, for my logged in session, Google still gives the dashboard as first result -- maybe because I've visited that result before -- but now without a description 🙄 looking forward to this fixing itself as well over time:

First result has no description	When you click on "Learn why"

)