Opened 4 years ago
Closed 22 months ago
#5323 closed defect (bug) (fixed)
Plugin searches should force to lowercase
Reported by: | jonoaldersonwp | Owned by: | |
---|---|---|---|
Milestone: | Priority: | low | |
Component: | Plugin Directory | Keywords: | seo |
Cc: |
Description
Plugin searches like https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/Cats/ support mixed-case URLs.
The search form submission/handling process should return a lowercase URL, and, direct requests to mixed-cased URLs here should be forced to lowercase via a 301 redirect.
Change History (13)
#2
@
4 years ago
If you're concerned about the input box and H1 contents, then we could add some additional complexity to the ticket to address - we could de-couple the search query and how it's (re)presented to the user from the slug; maintaining the former, and forcing the latter to lowercase.
#3
@
4 years ago
The search pages have "noindex,follow", does it really matter in terms of SEO or this is just for esthetics.
Also, why this is a high priority task? Which criterion is used to set a priority in the meta trac?
Thanks!
#4
@
4 years ago
Yes, it matters. We have millions of pages on a site which is still profoundly unhealthy. We have hundreds of thousands of URLs which Google hasn't even evaluated yet, because crawling the site is so resource-intensive, and so poorly optimized. Every single individual URL which we can de-duplicate and bring up to something resembling best practice claws back crawl budget and resource for the URLs which matter.
#6
@
3 years ago
- Priority changed from high to low
Given we already have this in robots.txt
, is there any real reason why we shouldn't just add /plugins/search
to it as well?
User-agent: * Disallow: /search
I understand it's not the ideal option, but it seems pointless to have search engines access potentially millions of URLs that are intentionally noindexed.
This is not a high priority ticket.
#7
@
3 years ago
Yeah, that's better than nothing; let's do that, and unpick the damages in some theoretical future.
#9
follow-up:
↓ 10
@
3 years ago
Worth noting that this might have some unexpected consequences; I know a number of sites/plugins/etc link directly to these types of URLs, in a way that currently assists discovery (and likely pass equity, despite the noindex
status).
Blocking access to and visibility of that completely will change the balance of power in the ecosystem; we should expect potential grumblings as plugin installs decline in some cases.
#10
in reply to:
↑ 9
@
3 years ago
Replying to jonoaldersonwp:
Worth noting that this might have some unexpected consequences; I know a number of sites/plugins/etc link directly to these types of URLs, in a way that currently assists discovery (and likely pass equity, despite the
noindex
status).
Hmm.. Noted, I can think of a few cases where that might be the case.
Let's see if we see any effective change from this, and re-evaluate it if needed.
Changing this would be of detriment to end-users, and complicated for non-ascii languages