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Fix googleability of docs #12466
Description
Googling for Rust documentation gives very inconsistent results, often to very old docs. Newbies often are led astray.
Old description:
This is a topic I haven't paid much attention to, but it's important, and I know our googlability has traditionally been very bad. I don't know at all what needs to be done off hand but it's something we should dedicate some effort to.
Nominating.
Tasks:
- description and keyword meta for home page
- description and keyword meta for standalone docs (needs rustdoc needs a way to specify HTML metadata for standalone docs #16178)
- description and keyword meta for crate docs
- descriptive titles for standalone docs
- teach rustdoc to meta (rustdoc needs a way to specify HTML metadata for standalone docs #16178)
- add
<link rel="canonical">to docs (needs rustdoc needs a way to specify HTML metadata for standalone docs #16178)
Activity
alexcrichton commentedon Feb 27, 2014
cc #9461
pnkfelix commentedon Feb 27, 2014
To clarify, the particular problem that has plagued us is that it is too easy to end up with outdated documentation when googling for help with problems.
pnkfelix commentedon Feb 27, 2014
Assigning 1.0, P-high.
emberian commentedon Feb 27, 2014
I imagine this could be partially alleviated with some well-placed meta tags.
Valloric commentedon Feb 28, 2014
The very first step should be reading Google's Webmaster Guidelines and related documents.
Also, here's a good doc Google has prepared on sensible SEO things webmasters can do.
Here's a really nice video on the topic of meta tags and their usefulness by Google's Matt Cutts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBTBEfd7z_Y
adrientetar commentedon Mar 11, 2014
The DNS issue is #4394.
brson commentedon Aug 1, 2014
@Valloric thank you for those helpful links.
brson commentedon Aug 1, 2014
I've started a task list in the OP.
I did some basic searches for Rust datatypes in a private window today and the results looked good to me. I'm not sure if there's a whole lot we need to do.
Google is preferring the 'shorthand' doc urls, not the ones with version numbers in them.
I intend to run www.rust-lang.org through Google's various webmaster tools to see if it has any suggestions.
Valloric commentedon Aug 2, 2014
Well, you are using robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing the old API docs.
17 remaining items
brson commentedon Sep 11, 2014
Nominating for removal from 1.0. Not critical. Worst problems are solved.
Valloric commentedon Sep 11, 2014
@brson Have you made sure you aren't serving the same page content from two different URL structures without canonical annotations?
http://doc.rust-lang.org/master/std/index.htmlandhttp://doc.rust-lang.org/std/index.htmlshow the same page for me. As I mentioned previously, I recommend looking at this Google support doc on canonical URLs.In your case, making sure one of those pages uses
<link rel="canonical" href="[canonical page url]" />would be a good idea.Even better, make one of those URLs 301 to the other or better still, have just one URL structure for getting to the content.
brson commentedon Sep 11, 2014
@Valloric No, I have not.
Valloric commentedon Sep 12, 2014
@brson Consider fixing that before you get tons of people searching for Rust docs. It's always a good idea to have your canonical urls sorted out, for any site.
pnkfelix commentedon Sep 18, 2014
Removing from 1.0 milestone but leaving as P-high. No one wants to block the release on just the issue pointed out by @Valloric 's comment here: #12466 (comment)
brson commentedon Jul 14, 2016
Closing in favor of specific linked bugs.
Auto merge of rust-lang#12466 - lnicola:worker-thread-stack, r=lnicola
Auto merge of rust-lang#12466 - J-ZhengLi:issue12377, r=blyxyas