Support forum topics with Cyrillic titles cannot be found via Google

[SergeyBiryukov]

Migrating from ​#wp19011:

None of the topics with Cyrillic titles on ru.forums.wordpress.org can be found via Google. Topics with Latin slugs are indexed properly. Same for the other forums in Cyrillic (bg.forums.wordpress.org and sr.forums.wordpress.org).

This wasn't a big issue three years ago when there were just a few posts, but now that more and more questions are asked and answered each day, it's hard for users to find previous topics and solutions.

​According to Otto, there's no robots.txt or anything else blocking Google from indexing them.

This is probably a Google bug, but I've tried to ask on their Help forum, and no one replied.

My guess is this has to do with 4th-level domains currently used for localized support forums. In this case, wouldn't it be possible to switch from ru.forums.wordpress.org to ru.wordpress.org/support/, similarly to English support forums?

Another workaround would be to switch again to ​numeric permalinks (provided that the current links will remain accessible). Seems like it's possible at least in bbPress 1.1.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Could be related to #245?

[SergeyBiryukov]

To clarify:

• There's no way to get localized search results using the "Search WordPress.org" form in the header (#347).
• There's no way to find them via Google either (this ticket).
• "Search term" in bbPress admin doesn't work for Cyrillic words (#276).

So even if I do remember the keywords of a specific topic, it's still virtually impossible to find it.

[joostdevalk]

Do you have examples of URLs that you can't find in Google? Or am I misunderstanding what your meaning with this issue is? :)

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to joostdevalk:

Do you have examples of URLs that you can't find in Google?

​https://ru.forums.wordpress.org/topic/Не-могу-зайти-в-общие-пункты-консоли
​https://ru.forums.wordpress.org/topic/логин-не-может-содержать-символ-_
​https://ru.forums.wordpress.org/topic/на-сайте-пропал-поиск

Or any other of the 39 721 topics there (except those with English titles).

[joostdevalk]

I think the issue is caused because we do a 302 redirect from the URL to the url encoded version of the URL:

curl -i https://ru.forums.wordpress.org/topic/логин-не-может-содержать-символ-__
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 14:00:37 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://ru.forums.wordpress.org/topic/%d0%bb%d0%be%d0%b3%d0%b8%d0%bd-%d0%bd%d0%b5-%d0%bc%d0%be%d0%b6%d0%b5%d1%82-%d1%81%d0%be%d0%b4%d0%b5%d1%80%d0%b6%d0%b0%d1%82%d1%8c-%d1%81%d0%b8%d0%bc%d0%b2%d0%be%d0%bb-_
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-nc: MISS lax 250

Removing that redirect (as it's completely unneeded from a technical perspective) would fix it, but it might be easier to "just" switch to a newer version of bbPress ;)

[samuelsidler]

Tracking bug for upgrading to bbPress 2.x is #1544.

[SergeyBiryukov]

After the upgrade to bbPress 2.x in #1544, topics with Cyrillic slugs finally started appearing in Google results.