Re: URL aliases for WPD without /wiki

Likely a good idea. We do something like this with Wikimedia sites as well;
for instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page

We should probably add nice pages for 404s and other errors as well.

- Ryan


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 7:36 AM, Lea Verou <lea@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
> >
>
>