[hibernate-dev] Hibernate site SEO optimization

[Steve Ebersole]

I've started discussions about this in general wrt the hibernate.org
webpage.  There is a lot of version-specific information there.  Hosting
this specifically for documentation on the doc site would be one option.
Note however that we have limited forms of access to that docs site which
makes it less than easy to manage content out there manually.


On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 5:24 AM Vlad Mihalcea <mihalcea.vlad at gmail.com>
wrote:

> We could list the stable doc only in the sitemaps and exclude all the
> others from the robots.txt.
> This way Google will only index the stable docs.
>
> To navigate between versions we need to add a selector somewhere on the
> page to load a specific version of the docs, but that doesn't have to be
> indexed by Google.
>
> Vlad
>
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Sanne Grinovero <sanne at hibernate.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Stefania (my girlfriend but also a professional SEO consultant) also
> > pointed out that we should make sure that indexing engines understand
> > that the documentation pages are intentionally similar, as you get
> > penalised for duplicate content.
> >
> > So as you suggest we need to mark - for each guide - which one is the
> > "main" reference. I don't know if using a sitemap only is enough, I
> > was told that we need to add some headers in each webpage to refer it
> > to its canonical URL, I'll ask if we need both actions.
> >
> > On 7 December 2015 at 08:12, Vlad Mihalcea <mihalcea.vlad at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > > Thanks for pointing that out.
> > >
> > > The robots.txt is in place https://docs.jboss.org/robots.txt.
> > > But I couldn't find the sitemap.xml
> > >
> > > According to Google:
> > > https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en
> > > The sitemap.xml is important if:
> > >
> > > - Your site is really large
> > > - Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or
> > well
> > > not linked to each other. If you site pages do not naturally reference
> > each
> > > other, you can list them in a sitemap to ensure that Google does not
> > > overlook some of your pages.
> > >
> > > So we meet both these two requirements.
> > > Maybe we need to add a sitemap.xml and reference the link to the
> "stable"
> > > docs only and the modification date.
> > >
> > > Vlad
> > >
> > > On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Gunnar Morling <gunnar at hibernate.org>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hi Vlad,
> > >>
> > >> We already have something like this, at
> > >> http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/. The latest final version
> docs
> > >> are available there. It's only that results from there have not a good
> > >> search result ranking apparently.
> > >>
> > >> --Gunnar
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> 2015-12-04 20:42 GMT+01:00 Vlad Mihalcea <mihalcea.vlad at gmail.com>:
> > >> > Hi,
> > >> >
> > >> > It seems like a good step to tackle the SEO optimization problem is
> to
> > >> > offer a "curent" link in our site to point to the latest docs.
> > >> > That's how PostgreSQL and Spring do it and once this link is indexed
> > by
> > >> > google, it will always render the latest version of the docs:
> > >> >
> > >> > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/
> > >> >
> > >> >
> > >>
> >
> http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html
> > >> >
> > >> > MySQL does not offer this option and when googling something about
> > MySQL,
> > >> > there's a big chance of getting a 5.0 page instead of 5.6 or 5.7.
> > >> >
> > >> > I think we should add a "current" "symbolic link" in the docs
> folder:
> > >> >
> > >> > https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/
> > >> >
> > >> > and when we publish a new version, we need to go to Google Webmaster
> > >> Tools
> > >> > (at least that's how I do it on my blog) and ask google to reindex
> > that
> > >> > particular "current" link. I guess that could be automated too.
> > >> >
> > >> > Vlad
> > >> > _______________________________________________
> > >> > hibernate-dev mailing list
> > >> > hibernate-dev at lists.jboss.org
> > >> > https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev
> > >>
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > hibernate-dev at lists.jboss.org
> > > https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev
> >
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