Skip to content

Changed routes in the documentation broke all incoming Google links (and probably all older links) #2594

Closed
@kevinburke

Description

@kevinburke

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

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions