1405436 - Redirect these URLs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

The SEO tool Moz helps us identify URLs on www.mozilla.org that have lots of links pointing at them. It can also filter by the response code on the URL. I created a spreadsheet with URLs in the Firefox site that have backlinks but are 404s:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o99yXgstrt298uvAxc50voAJlj04pbgrLm8uOKrbXX8/edit#gid=1031181026

If we add about 12 new redirects we will solve hundreds of these including all of the ones with a large number of links. Solving these will help SEO on Firefox pages.

In yellow on that spreadsheet, I suggest destinations and offer some pseudocode regexes to glob URLs together. The regexes suggested are not tested -- I've done my best to explain the intent behind them for implementers.

Comment 1

[GitHub Bugzilla PR Linker]

Attachment: Link to GitHub pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/5176

Comment 2

[Paul [:pmac] McLanahan]

A few notes on what I've done in the above PR:

1. I decided to send the non-existent Firefox 38.0.3 release notes to the notes for 38.0.5 instead of 38.0.1. Seemed like going for the latest in that line was the right call.

2. It was difficult to figure out how to match the URLs with the "%E2%80%8E" at the end. This is a URL encoded Unicode control character called a Left to Right Mark[0]. So I couldn't just match "%" because by the time it was in the URL routing the actual character was there. So I'm matching just this specific character. If we see others we can potentially figure out how to match all control characters and remove them from the URLs.

3. /firefox/fx/ was already a redirect to /firefox/new/. I just changed that one to also accept stuff after the URL. If we'd like to change it to redirect to /firefox/ we certainly can.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark

Comment 3

[Paul [:pmac] McLanahan]

Actually I'm wrong about #3. I did go ahead and change it to just /firefox/. I'm happy to change it back if we'd like to.

Comment 4

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/2271411b448422fe920dc1ae91851580e1549911
Fix bug 1405436: Add redirects for a lot of 404s with links in the wild

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/2883e3e0cdd241a90759274ca5463582d168a5c6
Merge pull request #5176 from pmac/redirect-404s-1405436

Fix bug 1405436: Add redirects for a lot of 404s with links in the wild