Description
The URL structure of the documentation changed suddenly without any thought for existing links to older pages, including from Google. From my experience at Twilio, about 50% of traffic to our documentation came from Google; breaking Google is a big deal. It's also, at least for this user, incredibly frustrating to get promised a focused page by Google and then get redirected to a generic page.
Here are some examples of queries which get redirected to a generic homepage.
- "sails policies"
- "sails controllers"
- "sails i18n"
- "sails models"
- "sails services" (Doesn't promise a custom page, but doesn't find the Services page either)
- "sails routes"
- "sails log[ging]"
- "sails roadmap"
- "sails csrf"
Here's what you see in Google:
When I click that link, I expect to get a page that explains how models work, how to use them, how to write them etc.
Here's what you see when you reach the documentation (word "models" appears once in a list with 20 items):
(For some reason it also takes two clicks of the "Back" button to get back to Google from the clicked link, though this is a separate issue).
I don't have any information about referrer links (I didn't see a Google Analytics link, your server logs may have more information), but my guess is that a lot of the incoming referrer links are also broken.
I gave a talk about documentation hierarchy & finding things in docs which might be useful, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC67PzBgRYE