[openstack.org] SEO Improvements
Hi all - We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below: “Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open source ci - ? At least 3 competitors - Jenkins - ? Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ? Cheers, Jimmy
Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur <mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open infrastructure - ?
At least 3 competitors - AWS - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
Cheers, Jimmy
On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 15:46 -0500, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur <mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open infrastructure - ?
At least 3 competitors - AWS - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
honestly the only think i would like to see is fixing the search result so that the 'latest' version of all our doc are at the top of the list instead of pike. the docs for our older release always come up first and its hard fo fine the direct link to the 'latest' version which tracks master. granted i have it save in my broswer history but when users are looking for docs on things it would be nice if they got the more recent docs.
Cheers, Jimmy
On 2020-03-13 20:59:30 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote: [...]
honestly the only think i would like to see is fixing the search result so that the 'latest' version of all our doc are at the top of the list instead of pike. the docs for our older release always come up first and its hard fo fine the direct link to the 'latest' version which tracks master.
granted i have it save in my broswer history but when users are looking for docs on things it would be nice if they got the more recent docs.
Yep, this trips me up fairly often as well. The pattern of serving multiple versions of documentation is a fairly widespread one, far beyond just OpenStack circles, so maybe we should look at some other examples and see if we can reverse engineer how they manage to direct search results to their latest versions. For example, why do searches for Python module names return results under https://docs.python.org/3/ before they return results for https://docs.python.org/3.5/ ? I briefly skimmed the page sources for some examples but nothing jumped out at me, nor did the site's robots.txt provide any insight. Perhaps SEO specialists know what trick is at play there? -- Jeremy Stanley
Jeremy Stanley <mailto:fungi@yuggoth.org> March 13, 2020 at 4:33 PM On 2020-03-13 20:59:30 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote: [...]
Yep, this trips me up fairly often as well. The pattern of serving multiple versions of documentation is a fairly widespread one, far beyond just OpenStack circles, so maybe we should look at some other examples and see if we can reverse engineer how they manage to direct search results to their latest versions. For example, why do searches for Python module names return results under https://docs.python.org/3/ before they return results for https://docs.python.org/3.5/ ? I briefly skimmed the page sources for some examples but nothing jumped out at me, nor did the site's robots.txt provide any insight. Perhaps SEO specialists know what trick is at play there? I will add it to my list of questions. Normally you'd do it with redirects to the latest, but that doesn't help if you're trying to keep archived documentation. Sean Mooney <mailto:smooney@redhat.com> March 13, 2020 at 3:59 PM On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 15:46 -0500, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur<mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open infrastructure - ?
At least 3 competitors - AWS - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
honestly the only think i would like to see is fixing the search result so that the 'latest' version of all our doc are at the top of the list instead of pike. the docs for our older release always come up first and its hard fo fine the direct link to the 'latest' version which tracks master.
granted i have it save in my broswer history but when users are looking for docs on things it would be nice if they got the more recent docs.
Cheers, Jimmy
Jimmy McArthur <mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:46 PM Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur <mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open source ci - ?
At least 3 competitors - Jenkins - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
Cheers, Jimmy
On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 5:53 PM Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org> wrote:
Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> March 13, 2020 at 4:33 PM On 2020-03-13 20:59:30 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote: [...]
Yep, this trips me up fairly often as well. The pattern of serving multiple versions of documentation is a fairly widespread one, far beyond just OpenStack circles, so maybe we should look at some other examples and see if we can reverse engineer how they manage to direct search results to their latest versions. For example, why do searches for Python module names return results under https://docs.python.org/3/ before they return results for https://docs.python.org/3.5/ ? I briefly skimmed the page sources for some examples but nothing jumped out at me, nor did the site's robots.txt provide any insight. Perhaps SEO specialists know what trick is at play there?
I will add it to my list of questions. Normally you'd do it with redirects to the latest, but that doesn't help if you're trying to keep archived documentation.
Sean Mooney <smooney@redhat.com> March 13, 2020 at 3:59 PM
On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 15:46 -0500, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur <mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> <jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open infrastructure - ?
At least 3 competitors - AWS - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
honestly the only think i would like to see is fixing the search result so that the 'latest' version of all our doc are at the top of the list instead of pike. the docs for our older release always come up first and its hard fo fine the direct link to the 'latest' version which tracks master.
granted i have it save in my broswer history but when users are looking for docs on things it would be nice if they got the more recent docs.
Cheers, Jimmy
Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:46 PM Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open source ci - ?
At least 3 competitors - Jenkins - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
Cheers, Jimmy
It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release. [image: image.png] -- ~/DonnyD C: 805 814 6800 "No mission too difficult. No sacrifice too great. Duty First"
On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 5:53 PM Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org> wrote:
Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> March 13, 2020 at 4:33 PM On 2020-03-13 20:59:30 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote: [...]
Yep, this trips me up fairly often as well. The pattern of serving multiple versions of documentation is a fairly widespread one, far beyond just OpenStack circles, so maybe we should look at some other examples and see if we can reverse engineer how they manage to direct search results to their latest versions. For example, why do searches for Python module names return results under https://docs.python.org/3/ before they return results for https://docs.python.org/3.5/ ? I briefly skimmed the page sources for some examples but nothing jumped out at me, nor did the site's robots.txt provide any insight. Perhaps SEO specialists know what trick is at play there?
I will add it to my list of questions. Normally you'd do it with redirects to the latest, but that doesn't help if you're trying to keep archived documentation.
Sean Mooney <smooney@redhat.com> March 13, 2020 at 3:59 PM
On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 15:46 -0500, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur <mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> <jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open infrastructure - ?
At least 3 competitors - AWS - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
honestly the only think i would like to see is fixing the search result so that the 'latest' version of all our doc are at the top of the list instead of pike. the docs for our older release always come up first and its hard fo fine the direct link to the 'latest' version which tracks master.
granted i have it save in my broswer history but when users are looking for docs on things it would be nice if they got the more recent docs.
Cheers, Jimmy
Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:46 PM Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open source ci - ?
At least 3 competitors - Jenkins - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
Cheers, Jimmy
It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release. yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change how that baner is create but i basically always ignore it because it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more helpflly making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both be greate improvemnts. [image: image.png]
On 2020-03-14 14:05:32 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote:
On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote: [...]
It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release. [...] yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change how that baner is create but i basically always ignore it because it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more helpflly making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both be greate improvemnts.
The solution to the technical problem is straightforward (even a simple HTML form element would to the trick), the bigger challenge is logistical: Content moves around between releases, it's not just renamed but often gets split or combined too, and lots of times folks don't think to include redirects from old filenames when they make major edits like that. All too often when I'm looking something up in the published HTML copies of our documentation I'll land on the wrong version, edit the URL to a later release, and get a 404 for that file. Someone (really multiple someones) will need to do a thorough audit to work out what redirects we missed between previous releases as well as coming up with ways to better remind folks to add redirects and maybe leave other breadcrumb trails when making future changes. -- Jeremy Stanley
On 3/14/20 9:20 AM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
On 2020-03-14 14:05:32 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote:
On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote: [...]
It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release. [...] yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change how that baner is create but i basically always ignore it because it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more helpflly making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both be greate improvemnts.
The solution to the technical problem is straightforward (even a simple HTML form element would to the trick), the bigger challenge is logistical: Content moves around between releases, it's not just renamed but often gets split or combined too, and lots of times folks don't think to include redirects from old filenames when they make major edits like that. All too often when I'm looking something up in the published HTML copies of our documentation I'll land on the wrong version, edit the URL to a later release, and get a 404 for that file. Someone (really multiple someones) will need to do a thorough audit to work out what redirects we missed between previous releases as well as coming up with ways to better remind folks to add redirects and maybe leave other breadcrumb trails when making future changes.
I just ran into this and I think there's a middle ground that would still help a lot. Right now if you click on the banner to go to the latest release it redirects you back to the main docs.openstack.org page. Could it at least redirect you to the root of the project you were already looking at? I realize that might break on project renames, but that seems like a massively smaller problem to solve than trying to keep track of internal structural changes in each project's docs.
Could it at least redirect you to the root of the project you were already looking at? I realize that might break on project renames, but that seems like a massively smaller problem to solve than trying to keep track of internal structural changes in each project's docs.
Slightly heavier-weight, but potentially much more useful, can't the link do some js for you (either on page load or when you click it) to probe, in order: - The page you were looking for, s/$release/latest/ - failing that, the root of the project, as Ben suggests - failing that, the current behavior efried .
On 2020-03-19 18:10:01 -0500 (-0500), Eric Fried wrote:
Could it at least redirect you to the root of the project you were already looking at? I realize that might break on project renames, but that seems like a massively smaller problem to solve than trying to keep track of internal structural changes in each project's docs.
Slightly heavier-weight, but potentially much more useful, can't the link do some js for you (either on page load or when you click it) to probe, in order:
- The page you were looking for, s/$release/latest/ - failing that, the root of the project, as Ben suggests - failing that, the current behavior
I'm pretty sure Apache .htaccess rules could manage that without any client-side scripting. I know it has ways to define conditional redirect behavior depending on whether specific files exist or not. -- Jeremy Stanley
Jeremy Stanley <mailto:fungi@yuggoth.org> March 19, 2020 at 6:22 PM
I'm pretty sure Apache .htaccess rules could manage that without any client-side scripting. I know it has ways to define conditional redirect behavior depending on whether specific files exist or not. Yep. I think you could do this with RegEx and maybe enhance it with some javascript. Adding Sebastian and JP to this thread to hopefully catch up :) Eric Fried <mailto:openstack@fried.cc> March 19, 2020 at 6:10 PM
Slightly heavier-weight, but potentially much more useful, can't the link do some js for you (either on page load or when you click it) to probe, in order:
- The page you were looking for, s/$release/latest/ - failing that, the root of the project, as Ben suggests - failing that, the current behavior
efried .
Ben Nemec <mailto:openstack@nemebean.com> March 19, 2020 at 6:04 PM
I just ran into this and I think there's a middle ground that would still help a lot. Right now if you click on the banner to go to the latest release it redirects you back to the main docs.openstack.org page. Could it at least redirect you to the root of the project you were already looking at? I realize that might break on project renames, but that seems like a massively smaller problem to solve than trying to keep track of internal structural changes in each project's docs.
Jeremy Stanley <mailto:fungi@yuggoth.org> March 14, 2020 at 9:20 AM On 2020-03-14 14:05:32 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote:
On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote: [...]
It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release. [...] yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change how that baner is create but i basically always ignore it because it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more helpflly making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both be greate improvemnts.
The solution to the technical problem is straightforward (even a simple HTML form element would to the trick), the bigger challenge is logistical: Content moves around between releases, it's not just renamed but often gets split or combined too, and lots of times folks don't think to include redirects from old filenames when they make major edits like that. All too often when I'm looking something up in the published HTML copies of our documentation I'll land on the wrong version, edit the URL to a later release, and get a 404 for that file. Someone (really multiple someones) will need to do a thorough audit to work out what redirects we missed between previous releases as well as coming up with ways to better remind folks to add redirects and maybe leave other breadcrumb trails when making future changes. Sean Mooney <mailto:smooney@redhat.com> March 14, 2020 at 9:05 AM On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 5:53 PM Jimmy McArthur<jimmy@openstack.org> wrote:
Jeremy Stanley<fungi@yuggoth.org> March 13, 2020 at 4:33 PM On 2020-03-13 20:59:30 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote: [...]
Yep, this trips me up fairly often as well. The pattern of serving multiple versions of documentation is a fairly widespread one, far beyond just OpenStack circles, so maybe we should look at some other examples and see if we can reverse engineer how they manage to direct search results to their latest versions. For example, why do searches for Python module names return results under https://docs.python.org/3/ before they return results for https://docs.python.org/3.5/ ? I briefly skimmed the page sources for some examples but nothing jumped out at me, nor did the site's robots.txt provide any insight. Perhaps SEO specialists know what trick is at play there?
I will add it to my list of questions. Normally you'd do it with redirects to the latest, but that doesn't help if you're trying to keep archived documentation.
Sean Mooney<smooney@redhat.com> March 13, 2020 at 3:59 PM
On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 15:46 -0500, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur<mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> <jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open infrastructure - ?
At least 3 competitors - AWS - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
honestly the only think i would like to see is fixing the search result so that the 'latest' version of all our doc are at the top of the list instead of pike. the docs for our older release always come up first and its hard fo fine the direct link to the 'latest' version which tracks master.
granted i have it save in my broswer history but when users are looking for docs on things it would be nice if they got the more recent docs.
Cheers, Jimmy
Jimmy McArthur<jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:46 PM Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed below:
Jimmy McArthur<jimmy@openstack.org> March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM Hi all -
We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement for all OSF projects. I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved. Could you all help out in providing the below:
“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay) - open source ci - ?
At least 3 competitors - Jenkins - ?
Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help best filter for relevance - ?
Cheers, Jimmy
It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release. yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change how that baner is create but i basically always ignore it because it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more helpflly making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both be greate improvemnts. [image: image.png]
On Thu, 2020-03-19 at 18:04 -0500, Ben Nemec wrote:
On 3/14/20 9:20 AM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
On 2020-03-14 14:05:32 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote:
On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote:
[...]
It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release.
[...]
yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change how that baner is create but i basically always ignore it because it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more helpflly making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both be greate improvemnts.
The solution to the technical problem is straightforward (even a simple HTML form element would to the trick), the bigger challenge is logistical: Content moves around between releases, it's not just renamed but often gets split or combined too, and lots of times folks don't think to include redirects from old filenames when they make major edits like that. All too often when I'm looking something up in the published HTML copies of our documentation I'll land on the wrong version, edit the URL to a later release, and get a 404 for that file. Someone (really multiple someones) will need to do a thorough audit to work out what redirects we missed between previous releases as well as coming up with ways to better remind folks to add redirects and maybe leave other breadcrumb trails when making future changes.
I just ran into this and I think there's a middle ground that would still help a lot. Right now if you click on the banner to go to the latest release it redirects you back to the main docs.openstack.org page. Could it at least redirect you to the root of the project you were already looking at? I realize that might break on project renames, but that seems like a massively smaller problem to solve than trying to keep track of internal structural changes in each project's docs.
that would be an improvment. medium term regardign doc resturcing i was wondering if there was a way to add a metadta tag fo some form to a page like a uuid that would live with that doument enve if it was renamed that we could link too instead? e.g. in each doc add a .. unique_id : <some uuid> and then create a directory at the top that would have a fill per uuid which just contains a redirect to the relevent file. so the baner would link to ${base_domain}/<project>/latest/reirects/${uuid} which would be a file genereated by sphinx that redirect to the file corresponding to ${uuid}
participants (6)
-
Ben Nemec
-
Donny Davis
-
Eric Fried
-
Jeremy Stanley
-
Jimmy McArthur
-
Sean Mooney