Closed Bug 1423716 Opened 8 years ago Closed 7 years ago

Stop appending " - Web developer guides" to <title> of pages under docs/Web/Guide

Categories

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, enhancement, P2)

Product:
developer.mozilla.org Graveyard
Component:
Wiki pages
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: sheppy, Assigned: dflanagan+bugzilla)

Details

(Keywords: in-triage)

We add a suffix to the <title> of pages in various areas of MDN. Usually it's pretty short, but this one is very long and is getting in the way of optimizing SEO for guide content. The primary cause for needing this change is that given that SEO recommends that we keep our titles between 50-60 characters ideally, the text " - Web developer guides" is using nearly half of that space, making it difficult to optimize page titles for SEO in this portion of the site.
John, can you research the effort here?
Flags: needinfo?(jwhitlock)
Keywords: in-triage
Priority: -- → P2
The pattern is that the "SEO Root" document's title is being added at the end of the title. For example, for https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Marketplace/API/DOMApplicationsRegistry/install, the SEO root is https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive, and the string "- Archive of obsolete content" is added to the title. For https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/AJAX, the SEO root is https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide, which has the title "Web developer guides". Pages under https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web are customized so that the second-level URL (Web/Guide, Web/CSS) is used as the SEO root. It would be fairly easy to drop this feature entirely, and only use the document title as the <head> title. Anything more complex, such as using it in some places and not others, will require per-tree estimates.
Flags: needinfo?(jwhitlock)
How about dropping the custom Title and only adding "| MDN" to all documents?
Assignee: nobody → djf
Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/ff5f81e65c22ddb530a3a2355caee138a4a3f569 Bug 1423716: stop adding the SEO root title to all document titles We currently constuct the <title> of a document like this: <title> - <SEO root document title> | MDN So for https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS we have: Learn to style HTML using CSS - Learn web development | MDN This patch shortens the title by removing the SEO root title, leaving: Learn to style HTML using CSS | MDN https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/de1c22b44498a8e088f3e14bc3d7d0024f0483cc Merge pull request #5142 from davidflanagan/simplify-titles Bug 1423716: stop adding the SEO root title to all document titles
Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/5fdf95cae312cbddaceb89be32370c7fe4ec27e2 Bug 1423716 - fix a failing functional test https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/50f76e6533a3dae538829db49a972fd37d4c7c23 Merge pull request #5155 from davidflanagan/fix-functional-test Bug 1423716 - fix a failing functional test
Deployed to stage and master
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 7 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED

I looked at our y/y traffic data and it's clear that we dropped 16 percentage points in organic search traffic in the 2 days following this change. Because of the all hands we had not pushed any changes for 10 days before this change and we didn't have a production push for 5 days after that. Here's the full change set: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/compare/2687c59...4ec6e67

From that list, this change seems to be the most likely to have had SEO impact. Now, I don't know why this change would have that much of an effect, but if the drop is based on our changes, this seems to be the most likely culprit. Can you please revert the change, so we can test this theory?

Kinda hoping it's not this change, but considering the massive drop in traffic, it would be irresponsible to not at least check.

I think it is just as likely that changing all of our titles again will give another 16% drop in search traffic.

Interesting. I realized a while ago that there is no "JavaScript" in the titles.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array is only "Array | MDN". I guess "javascript array", "js array" etc is searched for quite often.

W3schools is first for me now https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+array

Would a revert make this (again) "Array – JavaScript | MDN"?

(In reply to John Whitlock [:jwhitlock] from comment #9)

I think it is just as likely that changing all of our titles again will give another 16% drop in search traffic.

In which case we can revert the revert ;)

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I think Google includes the age of the title in the search ranking algorithm, and penalizes us for changing the title.

However, Florian is more convincing, that going from "Array - JavaScript | MDN" to "Array | MDN" is probably a big hit.

djf, do you want to revert?

Status: RESOLVED → REOPENED
Resolution: FIXED → ---

and Sheppy, do you agree?

Flags: needinfo?(eshepherd)

Ouch! This was I think my very first patch. Emabarassed to have caused so much damage!

I'll prepare a PR that reverts this.

I could also prepare a PR that then does what the title of the bug requested originally and only remove "Web Developer Guides" from things under "/Web/Guide" but leave the SEO titles for everything else. Or, if I'm special casing the /Web/Guides thing, I could change that to a shorter string like "Guides" or "Tutorials" or "Webdev".

Sorry about this, everyone... SEO is hard!

There's a PR to revert the whole thing here: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/pull/5226

And on second thought, trying to hardcode a different seo title to use instead of "Web developer guides" will get us into localization problems (unless I hardcode it english only.) Looks like the title of /Web/Guide has changed to just be "Developer guides" so that's a bit shorter anyway, even though it probably isn't much good for SEO.

If there was more content under /Web/Guide/, I'd suggest using the third element of the slug as the seo root, and hardcoding that as the special case here. But it doesn't look like it would affect many documents, so I'm guessing it is safer to do nothing at this point.

Go ahead and revert it. I would actually prefer we come up with a more intelligent solution than this but given time constraints, this will do.

Flags: needinfo?(eshepherd)
Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/a5a3efa3b7c0e061fb6466c50d6558f566a38b26 Revert "Bug 1423716: stop adding the SEO root title to all document titles" This reverts commits ff5f81e65c22ddb530a3a2355caee138a4a3f569 and 5fdf95cae312cbddaceb89be32370c7fe4ec27e2. https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/5cf16a16f94fafbcedfbfd3aab52d4127e646225 Merge pull request #5226 from davidflanagan/revert-bug-1423716 Revert "Bug 1423716: stop adding the SEO root title to all document titles"

Thanks for the quick revert. And no worries David, I shouldn't have made that off hand comment earlier in the bug. I didn't see this in the sprint planning, and unfortunately was on PTO for a few weeks after it was pushed to production. I think we need a light protocol around SEO changes. We need to at least compare the before and after for 7 days before moving on. Ideally we test the change with one area before making a site wide change.

@atopal - Agreed; we need to have a system in place to compare the before and after. We should have a specific place we record our results and what is being tested so we can keep things straight.

Sheppy, we can use sanitycheck for the testing. Taking this into the mdnseo slack channel for further discussion.

I'm going to close this now, since I don't think there is anything else to be done.

Kadir: if reverting this change doesn't fix things, I think we'll need a new bug about that.

Sheppy: if you still want to think about changes to the SEO root titles, I think that probably deserves a fresh bug as well.

Status: REOPENED → RESOLVED
Closed: 7 years ago → 7 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED

Quick update. Y/Y traffic is positive again for all top 20 countries, except Korea, China and the US, it happened right after this change went into production. In China it's the spring festival/new year, so Y/Y data is not comparable. Same goes for Korean new year. I don't quite understand the data for the US yet, but we can at least see a reduction in the gap. I'll monitor for at least one more week, and give an update then.

Final verdict: Yeah, title wording and content is a big deal. We are at 12% y/y growth again. The gap for the US has narrowed further, but it's still negative y/y. Discussed this with Sheppy and Raphael, but couldn't think of a particularly good reason. Will keep monitoring to see if that trend continues, but it's not part of this bug anymore. Either way, we ran a massive unintended experiment, would probably be worth writing about it.

Side note: I dug into the data some more and it turns out, the US had stopped showing positive y/y growth right after October 30th 2018. We discussed that too, but couldn't think of a good reason and the data we looked at was not helpful. The change sets before that date don't look like they should impact SEO.

Product: developer.mozilla.org → developer.mozilla.org Graveyard
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