SEO audit

[iandunn]

Once WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins#38 is done (especially WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins#42), we should take a look to make sure there aren't any SEO regressions in the content areas.

Header/footers are covered by WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins#43

[iandunn]

@jonoalderson, do you have any interest in this?

The staging site is https://wordpress.org/news-test/

[jonoalderson]

Oooh, thanks for thinking of me @iandunn! Yes please; will explore!
Next week sensible?

[iandunn]

Definitely, thanks!

[jonoalderson]

Looking good! Just a few SEO concerns:

• We already have thin+duplicate category issues (e.g., see https://wordpress.org/news-test/category/development/ vs https://wordpress.org/news-test/category/releases/). Should these really be categories? I think it'd make more sense semantically for them to be tags, and, for us to noindex all tag pages. Regardless, let's take a critical look at all of the taxonomy types and members, and determine what should be consolidated/indexed/noindexed.

• What's happening to all the old/existing blog/news content? Do we have a migration or retirement strategy?

• What does the international setup look like? I don't see any hreflang tags.

And some performance issues:

• Some of the images in the "People of WordPress" section have enormous file sizes. Are we missing processes to optimize these before/on upload?

• We should compress those big SVG files, too.

• Can we ditch the remote Google Fonts call, and host+serve them locally?

And some UI issues:

• On larger screens, the blue paint ribbon starts to occlude links. See screenshot.
  

• It's not immediately obvious how I navigate up from / out of a given blog post, and there's only limited lateral navigation at the end of the post. I worry that we'll confuse people who arrive directly on these pages without context, get confused/stuck, and leave (and how that'll harm our SEO). This is especially apparent on larger screens where the navigation elements are all way out of the field of view, in the far corners.
  

[coreymckrill]

Thanks for taking a look @jonoalderson, this is helpful. I don't have answers to all of the above points, but a few followups:

What does the international setup look like? I don't see any hreflang tags.

My understanding is that for now, the scope of this new design is only the English version of the News site. There will be future efforts to make it functional for rosetta sites, e.g. es.wordpress.org/news.

It doesn't look like the current News site has hreflang tags either. I suppose the ideal would be to have one for each rosetta site that also has a news section? I'm not sure the best way to accomplish that, but it might be worth opening a Meta Trac ticket, as that would be outside the scope of this theme in particular.

We should compress those big SVG files, too.

Seems like a good idea. Opened a separate issue for it here: #285

Can we ditch the remote Google Fonts call, and host+serve them locally?

Not sure why we're not doing that already, but definitely worth discussing: #286

It's not immediately obvious how I navigate up from / out of a given blog post, and there's only limited lateral navigation at the end of the post.

@beafialho any thoughts on this?

[beafialho]

It's not immediately obvious how I navigate up from / out of a given blog post, and there's only limited lateral navigation at the end of the post. I worry that we'll confuse people who arrive directly on these pages without context, get confused/stuck, and leave (and how that'll harm our SEO). This is especially apparent on larger screens where the navigation elements are all way out of the field of view, in the far corners.

@coreymckrill @jonoalderson besides post navigation down at the bottom of the posts, there's the Global Header - that gives users access to any part of WordPress.org and Search - and Local Navigation Bar containing all the blog's categories, including "All Posts", which contains every post from every category in chronological order. Also, they're sticky to make all this process much more immediate. That said, if you're in a blog post, it should be really easy to navigate both back to the News homepage, or to a different category. Here's a quick video showing what I mean:

navigation.mp4