Re: Thoughts on wpd.mx domain

AFAIK URLs with 301 redirects do get indexed, but the resulting pagerank goes to the page they point to (as Julee pointed out) and the latter is what shows up in Google, so there shouldn’t be any adverse SEO side effects.
However, I’m not sure wpd.mx is a good URL (.mx is hard to remember and doesn’t stand for anything WPD-related) and I’m not sure why we we even need short URLs. 

Just my two cents :)

Lea Verou
W3C developer relations
http://w3.org/people/all#lea ✿ http://lea.verou.me ✿ @leaverou






On Apr 23, 2013, at 09:59, Patrick D'Souza wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> It has been brought to my notice that wpd.mx has been setup as a url shortener for webplatform.org urls. for e.g. wpd.mx/apis/canvas 301s to http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/apis/canvas.
> This url has been indexed by Google and I don't like the thought of different urls pointing to the same content when a user is searching for canvas in a search engine. It dilutes the positive effects of a webplatform.org url.
> 
> Sorry to be a little picky but we should avoid all such short urls which confuse a user and in turn result in duplicate content being served to search engines. I see the benefit of a url shortener as it can be useful in social media campaigns as well as brand promotion for webplatform.org. I propose we use this url shortener on webplatform.org itself for e.g. webplatform.org/font-size which would redirect to docs.webplatform.org/css/properties/font-size.  Every 301 is one additional request for a user which is not good in terms of performance. I would appreciate if we avoid 301s as far as possible unless it's absolutely required. Always, keep it simple :)
> 
> Any thoughts and feedback are much appreciated.
> 
> - Patrick    
> 
>