Changed routes in the documentation broke all incoming Google links (and probably all older links) #2594
Comments
+1 |
I found 56,000 more broken links to the Sails docs: |
Hi @kevinburke, thanks for pointing this out. It sounds like it's been a pretty frustrating experience to navigate to the docs you need. Yo've uncovered a couple of issues here that we need to address separately:
Both the core team and the Sails community at large have put a ton of work into the docs over the past year, and we're really happy with the resulting content, so I share your frustration that it's not as accessible as it needs to be. Thanks again for your feedback and support! |
Some more examples of broken links (from searching last week)
|
Ok guys, we're working on this, see mikermcneil/old-public-facing-sails-website#50 |
Is there justification for why this was closed? |
because its open here https://github.com/balderdashy/www.sailsjs.org/issues/50 |
@kevinburke @dougblack @randallmeeker Hey guys, just for posterity want to mention that this is all fixed up now. |
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.
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
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: