481877 - Archive and redirect pages at /projects/firefox/l10n/

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Per Hung's comment on Seth's blog:

"Don’t how it is in other countries, but in Vietnam, when I google for “localize firefox” or “firefox localization” etc., the first result is usually “http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/index.html” which has very old content and even doesn’t link to the L10N Home Page. And the L10N Localization Process page is often below the 5th position."

From: <http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/2009/03/05/helpful-mozilla-localization-documentation/comment-page-1/#comment-138046>

I can confirm this in Poland too. The content on this page is outdated and it would be good to redirect the visitors coming to this page to https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n - the main starting point for all people interested in localization of Mozilla software.

Seth, Axel -- thoughts?

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Whatever we do should help to purge that link out of search engine results. I don't know if a perm redir does that as well as a 404 would. Or if a 404 just triggers folks to use the google cache.

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

perm redirects make Google update its databases to the new URL leaving other parameters such as siterank the same, while 404s make Google delete the page from its index - of course, both are things happening when it's reindexing.

Comment 3

[David Boswell]

I can go ahead and set up a redirect to point the index page to the wiki.  There's more than just the index.html page in the projects/firefox/l10n directory though.  What should we do with these files?

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/l10n-step-by-step.html
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/localize-release.html
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/repackage-0.9.pl
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/using-cvs.html		

Point them all to https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n or are there other pages to use?

Comment 4

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

All of them are equally bad, just redirect the whole dir to the l10n index page.

We might redirect to a better starting page at some point, but that's not close enough to talk about it.

Comment 5

[David Boswell]

OK, all of those html pages are redirecting and have been removed from the site.  Closing as fixed.

Comment 6

[David Boswell]

Reopening since the redirect I put in place for the index.html page doesn't seem to be working.  The other pages are redirecting though.  Maybe I missed something obvious, but feel free to take a look at this commit and let me know what the issue is if you see it.

http://bonsai-www.mozilla.org/cvsview2.cgi?diff_mode=context&whitespace_mode=show&file=.htaccess&branch=&root=/www&subdir=mozilla-org/html&command=DIFF_FRAMESET&rev1=1.172&rev2=1.173

Comment 7

[David Boswell]

I changed how I was redirecting the index page and now

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/index.html

redirects to

https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n

Unfortunately though

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/

brings up a 404 page.

The Google search for 'localize firefox' points to the URL with index.html so I'm closing this as fixed since that is redirecting fine.  If there is a need to have the other URL redirect too, feel free to reopen.

Comment 8

[Hùng]

The issue is still there.

Unfortunately, now the Google search results for "localize firefox", "localizing firefox", "firefox localization", etc... don't point to index.html anymore, but:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/l10n/
which is exactly what you were concerned.

Comment 9

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Reopening per comment 8.

Comment 10

[Robert Kaiser]

David, why use that RewriteRule and not something like I did for the download pages with a simple RedirectMatch? In the case there, we ended up correctly redirecting both the / and /index.html

Comment 11

[David Boswell]

Re comment #10, I used that RewriteRule since that's how we have been redirecting index pages lately and it works in other instances.  For example, the following works for www.mozilla.org/university, www.mozilla.org/university/ and www.mozilla.org/university/index.html.

RewriteRule ^university(?:/(?:index.html)?)?$ http://education.mozilla.org [R]

I'm sure there are other ways to set redirects up, but my understanding of the rewrite options is fairly limited.  Feel free to fix this if there's a better way.

Comment 12

[Robert Kaiser]

It may also be a problem if the directory still exists on disk, actually.

Comment 13

[Hùng]

Bad (or, maybe good) news: 
- Google has removed this link from its search results for "localize firefox", and I don't see the "L10N:Localization Process" page in the first 5 result pages.
- however, now the "L10n:Localization Process" is on top when searching for "firefox localize", "localization firefox", "firefox localization" :)
- the "L10n:Home Page" is 2nd when searching for "localizing firefox".

Comment 14

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Closing old Mozilla.org website bugs due to them not being relevant to the new Python-based Bedrock system. Re-open if this is a critical bug and should be resolved on the new system too.

Comment 15

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Looks like redirects are still needed here (based on 404 links from some of these links).

Comment 16

[Jennifer Bertsch [:jbertsch]]

Closing as redirects seem to be working.