Improve SEO - Githubissues

nprapps / elections22

Data pipeline and results graphics for the 2022 general election. Building off elections20-interactive.

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Improve SEO #9

Closed alykat closed 1 year ago

alykat commented 2 years ago

If we have time: The way the project was engineered, as a one-page app, was great for speed/responsiveness, but bad for SEO. Can this be rethought?

One possibility Thomas raised last time was to create state-specific "stub" pages

alykat commented 1 year ago

Collecting some of the initial ideas batted around that don't involve re-engineering the site:

Piggyback on the stub pages we're already creating/redirecting for social
Create stub pages that somehow impersonate the true/hashed URLs
Create a sitemap based on the stub pages and submit those for indexing?
Any useful strategies involving canonical urls or robots.txt?

Documentation:

canonical URLs: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls
robots.txt: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/robots_txt

Also:

@jsfenfen has asked Google to re/index the 2020 results pages (using the House board as a test) and we'll see what we get back

alykat commented 1 year ago

Some kind of dynamic rendering solution + a sitemap for key pages? https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/dynamic-rendering

jsfenfen commented 1 year ago

I submitted a sitemap for the '20 elections. After 48 hours the fix we submitted is still unvalidated, but it seems like this is gonna need a belt and suspenders approach.

jsfenfen commented 1 year ago

Sitemap and stub 22 results submitted to google. It's not clear we will have a chance to fix this; google has now taken more than 120 hours to validate missing canonical urls on 170 pages. Crazy how much less performant google is compared to ten years ago.

jsfenfen commented 1 year ago

I moved the canonical url hack into the page head. This canonical tag is now showing in the google search console' "test live url" option.

alykat commented 1 year ago

@jsfenfen did you try also updating the title and meta description w/ the same hack?

if i search npr election results 2022 michigan i'm actually seeing our results come up (albeit linked to the house board).