Docs: Facilitate indexing of the docs by certain search engines

[finnbear]

Description of the problem

When I want to look at the docs for a particular Three.js class, I type 'three.js [classname]` into my search engine of choice (DuckDuckGo). The only relevant result is the docs, but not the specific docs page. I then have to click the docs and search for the class again.

Feature request

If possible, facilitate indexing of all three.js docs pages. This may mean switching from '/docs/#api/etc' to '/docs/api/etc' urls, which could replace or forward to the existing pages.

Search engine

• [ ] All of them
• [ ] Google (only one I tried that worked)
• [x] DuckDuckGo
• [x] Bing
• [x] Yahoo

[Mugen87]

Well, yes. When using my search engine of choice, it looks as expected:

When clicking on the search result, you directly land on the Matrix4 page.

Sorry, I clearly don't vote to make the proposed change and break all existing URLs just because search engines can't do their job right.

[donmccurdy]

Does DuckDuckGo support hashbangs, or can we not use the URL fragment at all?

This isn't necessarily a large change, it might just mean adding a simple redirect.

[Mugen87]

This isn't necessarily a large change, it might just mean adding a simple redirect.

How would this look like? Can you configure redirects with GitHub pages?

[donmccurdy]

It used to be the case that #! was recommended with Google Search, and # basically wasn't supported. Redirecting from one to the other is just a JavaScript change.

Now it doesn't matter with Google Search. I don't know about DuckDuckGo. But you're right, if the hashbang thing doesn't work and we need to use real /docs/foo paths, we can't do this on GitHub Pages.

[finnbear]

Something I probably should have mentioned is that you already have URLs without the '#' that can be found with a slightly longer search term.

However, their title of "[name]" makes them difficult to see at first glance.

If you just fixed these pages to have the proper title, maybe duck duck go and the other search engines I mentioned would index them more readily.

This is a related issue that may explain the mentioned pages: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/10937

[mrdoob]

So their crawler doesn't support javascript?

[finnbear]

I can't speak to what DuckDuckGo or any other engine does internally, and I'm not suggesting you break any links or do the impossible. It seems like it would be possible to fix the missing [name]. https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/3c13d929f8d9a02c89f010a487e73ff0e57437c4/docs/api/en/math/Matrix4.html#L11

@mrdoob If you would be open to a PR, I would be willing to go through and add a