Re: URL aliases for WPD without /wiki

What do you guys think about also redirecting URLs that are not found (404) from webplatform.org/svg or www.webplatform.org/svg to docs.webplatform.org/wiki/svg? I often make the mistake of leaving out the "docs" subdomain and get an ugly 404.

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






On Mar 20, 2013, at 17:01, Doug Schepers wrote:

> Hey, folks-
> 
> On 3/20/13 9:02 AM, Denis Ah-Kang wrote:
>> On 03/19/2013 12:51 PM, Ryan Lane wrote:
>>> On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 8:32 AM, Lea Verouwrote:
>>> 
>>>     I’m not sure if I’m in the minority, but I often type WPD URLs by
>>>     hand, so typing the /wiki part every time is tedious. I was
>>>     wondering if we could set up redirects for the top level paths (e.g.
>>>     /css, /html, /svg etc) which redirect to the URL with the /wiki part
>>>     so that for example [1] becomes [2].
>>> 
>>>     Doug likes the idea but is concerned about potential SEO
>>>     implications. I think that if we do it with 301 redirects it will be
>>>     fine for SEO, but I might be wrong (?).
>>>     Denis, is it possible? I think it could be done with a few rules in
>>>     the .htaccess, perhaps without even having to explicitly list all
>>>     the top level categories (i.e. test if the path starts with /wiki
>>>     and if not, add it).
>>>     Everyone else, do you think it's a good idea?
>>> 
>>> This shouldn't hurt SEO. Assuming this structure won't change much in
>>> the future, it seems sane. Changes in the structure could harm SEO if
>>> we're unable to properly map the redirects to the new structure (dead
>>> links are bad). The rewrite rules for this should be easy-ish.
>> 
>> I added the redirects directly in the docs apache configuration. Let me
>> know if there's any issue.
> 
> Thanks, Denis, seems to work fine!
> 
> (To clarify, I didn't have concerns per se about SEO, I just wanted to get community opinion and buy-in, in case we were missing something.)
> 
> Regards-
> -Doug
>

Received on Thursday, 21 March 2013 14:36:45 UTC