[hibernate-dev] Hibernate site SEO optimization

[Sanne Grinovero]

On 9 December 2015 at 13:54, Hardy Ferentschik <hardy at hibernate.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 03:12:54PM +0200, Vlad Mihalcea wrote:
>> Is there any change we host the docs on hibernate.org and simply redirect
>> the old pages from
>>
>> http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate
>>
>> to
>>
>> http://hibernate.org/orm/documentation
>
> That would be an option I guess. Host the documentation somewhere else. I am sure
> we discussed this before, but I cannot remember the outcome.

Right, this isn't new but for some reason (probably time?) we never got to it.
I thought the outcome was that we couldn't move the docs away from the
jboss.org servers, but Emmanuel just told me there's no such rule.

So let's plan to move them all!

I think we need:
 - redirects in place from the previous location
 - make/update/verify a sitemap for hibernate.org
 - get the docs on hibernate.org
 - insert the right metadata in the older docs so to point to the
latest as their "canonical form"

And like Vlad suggested, let's simply exclude from indexing all very
old guides and docs which aren't easily patched to have the right
pointers to their latest version (I'm thinking especially about old
guides which don't have a 1:1 match).

I could spend a bit of time on this during Christmas, not before.

Sanne

>
> Regarding hibernate.org. The website is build via Awestruct from this repo
> https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate.org and pushed to GitHub Pages for hosting.
> The simplest solution would be to add the documentation to the site, but
> that might blow up the repository too much and make syncs to production too slow.
>
> I am not familar whether one could upload the documentation to GitHub Pages
> into a separate directory. I am not familiar on what and what not can be done
> here.
>
> Either way, the upload of new documentation needs to be scriptable, since pretty
> much all Hibernate projects have a script of some form to upload the documentation
> of a release to documentation server.
>
> --Hardy
>