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Bug 346623

Summary: Links to articles are gone in Google
Product: Community Reporter: Wim Jongman <wim.jongman>
Component: Forums and NewsgroupsAssignee: Forums and Newsgroups inbox <forums-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: P1 CC: webmaster
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows 7   
Whiteboard:

Description Wim Jongman CLA 2011-05-20 06:09:13 EDT 
When searching for eclipse terms in google there are broken links to the forum. For example, searching for the term:

headless workspace eclipse

gives a link to a forum article. This link points to this address

http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.webtools/msg13095.html

However, when you click on it it redirects you to this page:

http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=88

The search term does not appear on this page. 

This is a frustrating. It appears to happen to all the Google links to the forum.

can this be fixed?
Comment 1 Denis Roy CLA 2011-05-20 11:10:33 EDT 
The links you're finding are old newsgroup archives.  Before the Forums we would make an HTML copy of NNTP newsgroups for searching.  However, now that we have forums, search bots are indexing the same content twice.  This is bad for two reasons:

1. Search engines could think we're "stuffing" content, and lower our position

2. It generates more load on our servers, and consumes more bandwidth

3. Users who stumble upon old HTML archives have no way of responding or asking further questions

So we've removed the content; however, we've added "smart" rules that redirect the old links to the appropriate forum front-page.  From there, the user can use search to find their message.

I understand that this can lead to some frustration; however, the indexers index our site quite aggressively, so I am hoping that this pain will be short-lived.  The end result should be a more efficient index and a better experience for the users (ie, being shown a modern-looking Forum page where they not only get info, but can also interact, instead of a 1990's looking HTML page which is a dead-end).

FWIW -- I just now changed our rewrite rules so that users get sent to the forum, whereas search bots get a 404.  Hopefully this will accelerate the process of de-listing the old HTML content.
Comment 2 Wim Jongman CLA 2011-05-20 11:36:03 EDT 
> FWIW -- I just now changed our rewrite rules so that users get sent to the
> forum, whereas search bots get a 404.  Hopefully this will accelerate the
> process of de-listing the old HTML content.

Clever! I will wait a little then. Thanks.
Comment 3 Denis Roy CLA 2011-05-20 11:47:32 EDT 
> This is bad for two reasons:
> 
> 1. 
> 2. 
> 3. 


I need to learn how to count  :)
Comment 4 Wim Jongman CLA 2011-05-20 16:59:22 EDT 
 
> I need to learn how to count  :)

I can't count myself so I didn't notice.