Making WordPress.org

Opened 6 years ago

Closed 6 years ago

#3648 closed defect (bug) (fixed)

The "Advanced" tab is being indexed and showing up on SERPs

Reported by: johnbillion's profile johnbillion Owned by: obenland's profile obenland
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: Plugin Directory Keywords: needs-patch has-screenshots
Cc:

Description

Performing a search on Google for wordpress "debug media" (link) returns two results for wordpress.org in first and second place. The first is the link to the plugin, the second is the link to the Advanced tab of the plugin. This makes the search results confusing - it looks like there are two identical plugins available.

Ideally the Advanced tab would not be indexed, or it would contain a canonical header pointing to the main plugin page so that it doesn't appear in SERPs.

Attachments (1)

Screen Shot 2018-05-29 at 13.53.45.png (142.4 KB) - added by johnbillion 6 years ago.
Screenshot

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (6)

#1 @johnbillion
6 years ago

  • Keywords has-screenshots added

#2 @Otto42
6 years ago

The Advanced page does contain a canonical header pointing back to the main page. Has since it was created.

#3 @obenland
6 years ago

@joostdevalk Do you have a suggestion as to how to avoid this?

#4 @jonoaldersonwp
6 years ago

The canonical link has fixed the symptom, though I'd argue that this isn't a perfect fix; the page isn't equivalent to the original, and so I'd expect Google's honouring of the canonical hint to be sporadic.

We'd get more guaranteed results for this fix by including a meta robots tag on the advanced page, with a value of noindex, follow.

#5 @obenland
6 years ago

  • Owner set to obenland
  • Resolution set to fixed
  • Status changed from new to closed

In 7308:

Plugins: Prevent advanced tab from being indexed

Props jonoaldersonwp, johnbillion.
Fixes #3648..

Note: See TracTickets for help on using tickets.