Make sure to fix other repositories dead links on documentation update

[Kerollmops]

Hey, docs-team 👋

I would like to talk about the links to the documentation on other meilisearch repositories. You sometimes update the documentation without ensuring that other repositories link to the new path or redirect to the appropriate documentation page.

It would be great to set up a CI that checks and updates the URLs referenced in the source code of the most critical repositories and updates them. I would prefer that it is not the community that fixes those links, but instead, we do that on our side. I know that this CI will only be able to detect that after the change is merged, but at least we are aware of this URL breakage.

Have a nice day 🌞

[Strift]

I think SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs can perform daily/weekly audits to spot any potentials 404s we could have in the docs or our other sites.

It's a bit of a bigger scope because it would also apply to links coming from websites we don't own. But it could be a bigger win for a similar implementation cost, so I thought I'd mention it.

[guimachiavelli]

hello all, and thanks for the interest in this.

We have a simple process in place for changes to links in the docs. It relies mainly on two things:

1. A broken links checker running both locally and on push;
2. Whenever we change a link, we update our redirect files.

Under normal circumstances, this has ensured links across meilisearch repos always seamlessly redirect to the newer resource.

Unfortunately, our process has been heavily disrupted with the new website. We no longer have an automatic broken link checker, and redirects no longer live inside our repo—for every PR we create moving files around on the docs repo, we must create a separate PR on meilisearch/meilisearch.com. These two things together have made it much more likely for human errors to reach production, as you have definitely noticed.

basement is currently working on improving our workflow in this regard:

• enable redirects in the docs repo. The ETA was supposed to be the end of this week, but has been postponed to end of next week by basement. This should make it easier to track whether a link change has been properly redirected;
• implement a dead links checker. ETA early-to-mid July. They have chosen to do this after the redirects file because the dual-repo setup for the new docs site makes it harder for them to check whether a link is valid.

Using a tool like the ones suggested by @Strift would be a possible third step, once we are back to a minimum baseline of functionality.