SEO Improvements

[chrifro]

This is an addition to #821
Most tips relate to the suggestions of Sistrix optimizer.

Note: This issue should be addressed in several smaller PRs, please create a PR for each topic.

Page not found:

• https://www.gitpod.io/docs/languages-and-frameworks/ links to https://www.gitpod.io/docs/frameworks/pandas/ ->404

• https://www.gitpod.io/docs/gitlab-integration/ and https://www.gitpod.io/docs/bitbucket-integration/ links to https://www.gitpod.io/access-control/ ->404

• https://www.gitpod.io/docs/languages/dart/ links to https://gitpod.io/docs/config-docker -> 404

• https://www.gitpod.io/docs/languages-and-frameworks/ links to https://www.gitpod.io/docs/kotlin-in-gitpod/ -> 404

• https://www.gitpod.io/docs/languages/java/ links to https://www.gitpod.io/docs/vscode_extensions/ -> 404

Page not found -external links

• https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpodify/ links to https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/master/scripts/watch/client.sh -> 404

• https://www.gitpod.io/blog/build-a-webhook-for-google-assistant/ links to https://developers.google.com/actions/samples/github -> 404

Missing alt-tag

• https://www.gitpod.io/static/vendor-bg-fe98fcdf8bdc08026e8d2d390dab1f5d.png

• https://www.gitpod.io/static/college-students-03ccf407c383bd4bcc1ef7dd2d5a78ec.png

• https://www.gitpod.io/static/recruiting-bg-5d4ca5b37cedee043d7d79a6dca6ca44.png

meta description is too short
Google only crawls pages that have a certain length of meta description. 60-160 characters are recommended

• all pages under /doc
  Current meta description Documentation site for Gitpod.
  Suggestion: Explore the documentation to learn more about Gitpod.io and Gitpod Self-Hosted.

• /blog
  current meta description: Discover articles and tutorials about Gitpod
  suggestion: Visit the Gitpod blog to learn about releases, tutorials, news and more

• meta description for gitpod.io needs to be updated. Currently One-click ready-to-code development environments for GitHub. New suggestion: `Gitpod is an open source developer platform automating the provisioning of ready-to-code development environments."

Generally we should watch out that the meta description for new blog posts is not too short

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP)

• somehow when searching for gitpodthe result is not unfolded anymore. Features, Pricing, Self-hosted, Documentation and Community should have their own unfolded section. For gitpod documentationit works fine. See:

edit: I tried it again and sometimes it's shown correctly, but I can't identify what influences it

• please add self-hosted to the search overview

Pages with too few words
we should either add more words or a robots.txt file so that these pages won't be crawled

• [ ] Login Page -> 24 words, missing h1 EDIT: This will be address in the dashboard redesign

• community.gitpod.io/about -> 133 words
  Let's have a better description: `Gitpod is an open source developer platform automating the provisioning of ready-to-code development environments. It streamlines developer workflows by providing prebuilt, collaborative development environments in your browser - powered by VS Code. Natively integrated with GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket, Gitpod automatically and continuously prebuilds dev environments for all your branches. As a result team members can instantly start coding with fresh, ephemeral and fully-compiled dev environments - no matter if you are building a new feature, want to fix a bug or do a code review. Join our community, dive into discussions and get support around Gitpod.

Too big images

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2608/1*mXM-VDzzmpXCvlAVvQIjVw.gif

• https://www.gitpod.io/b052822cf8c7e4b70fb066e7be4b3562/phpDebug.gif

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/12000/0*_7n4Htwk2Iz-r9qA

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2612/0*VHUqe81CKwdHq7uK

• https://www.gitpod.io/f09a4d869c446fa2e6ad937346717421/scala-debug.gif

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/6380/1*P6TPpSyXQp6SmmhHyVrmBw.png

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/11236/1*YaZqFJXHopwW0puvvmfEew.png

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2608/0*-n2I6-4fPuKK70_5

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2608/0*vHysVOgVJaH6-j1t

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2608/0*yp7USviOYhUm_P40

• https://www.gitpod.io/50ecb4a35fca8e860a7ec5f0730611e3/JavaDebug.gif

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/10944/0*fni6JI11_OS6eJV7

• https://www.gitpod.io/b9b282611978183b277f3cfcd626f71c/PythonDebug.gif

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2608/0*YXS_V_quV3Lg7Y-X

• https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*yVXQ8QGJEmCnNQ52

• https://www.gitpod.io/1edb40359cd4db21cdcf05c6a5107423/GoDebug.gif

• https://www.gitpod.io/142a874b67e07ab454c578b3cdb6c63d/RustDebug.gif

Duplicated headlines
H1 headlines shouldn't be copied and always differentiate otherwise Google sees the page as duplicated content

• h1 on https://www.gitpod.io/docs/workspaces/ and https://www.gitpod.io/docs/self-hosted/latest/install/workspaces/

• why are all self-hosted docs listed twice? e.g. https://www.gitpod.io/docs/self-hosted/latest/install/install-on-kubernetes/ and https://www.gitpod.io/docs/self-hosted/0.4.0/install/install-on-kubernetes/ can we delete one version?

[chrifro]

Additional errors reported by ryte.com

[ ] add a sitemap.xml
why? it makes it easier for search engines to index dynamic content and the sitemap can help the search engine robots find files that are more difficult to access, such as images, faster and more easily. See here for more details
Edit: www.gitpod.io already has a sitemap.xml. The issue seem to address gitpod.io, please skip the issue for now

• please double-check canonical tags: "If the canonicals are missing or invalid, we relinquish control of our website's indexing. Therefore the incorrect version of the page might be shown in search engine results, risking search engine traffic."
  Edit: This might address gitpod.io if so please ignore it for now.

- [ ] add redirect: if the URL is accessed without the "www" it will not redirect to the page. This might cause frustrated users or duplicate content. E.g. https://www.gitpod.io/gitpod-vs-codespaces/ this issue is addressed in gitpod-io/gitpod#2659

• move all inline CSS to a central CSS-File
  why? This increases file size, increases maintainability of CSS and forces Browsers to do more Render-Cycles. -> The page loads 2 css files and uses 27 inline css blocks

• check the headline order it should be h1 first followed by h2 if possible :) see https://github.com/gitpod-io/website/pull/917

• missing width and height attribute for "Gitpod Screenshot", "D-Wave", "Rocket Launch" and "Gitpod Ready to Code"

• please check "The <head>area appears to be malformed. This can be due to text or invalid tags in your , or due to meta or link tags in your <body>.
  One effect of this issue might be missing meta information.
  This can cause misinterpretations (missing canonical for instance)."

• the w3c validator found 61 error(s) and 7 warning(s) -> see attached file
  w3c validator found 61 error(s) and 7 warning(s).zip EDIT: https://github.com/gitpod-io/website/issues/842#issuecomment-754660838 & https://github.com/gitpod-io/website/pull/932

• IP Canonicalization: If the IP (167.99.129.42) of this domain gets called, it should redirect to the real homepage of this domain. Not redirecting requests on the IP can cause duplicate content issues.

- [ ] move all inline CSS to a central CSS-File: The page (www.gitpod.io) loads 2 css files and uses 30 inline css blocks EDIT: "This is something done automatically by Gatsby and the use of emotion for styling. I don't think we can do something about it but maybe I'm wrong." https://github.com/gitpod-io/website/issues/842#issuecomment-739054146

• merge JavaScript into one file to improve page speed: The page loads 9 javascript files and uses 6 inline script blocks EDIT: https://github.com/gitpod-io/website/issues/842#issuecomment-739058557

• caching: the Max Age Parameter of our cache settings seems to be pretty low
  "Value of Cache-Control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate"

• Visitor IPs are not properly anonymized for Google Analytics

[nisarhassan12]

• meta description for gitpod.io needs to be updated. Currently One-click ready-to-code development environments for GitHub

@ChristinFrohne The current description for gitpod.io i.e the dashboard is Describe your dev environment as code and get fully prebuilt, ready-to-code development environments for any GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket project.

I tried searching in the repo.

[nisarhassan12]

I'm un-able to optimize maybe two or three gifs i.e I tried many online gif optimizers but none of them seems to do the job.

see https://www.gitpod.io/f09a4d869c446fa2e6ad937346717421/scala-debug.gif for example. May the reason is that it's already optimized/compressed.

[nisarhassan12]

Thanks, @ChristinFrohne I agree with you on this but it is something that has to be done on the Gitpod side i.e probably on the server which hosts gitpod.io

[nisarhassan12]

• move all inline CSS to a central CSS-File
  why? This increases file size, increases maintainability of CSS and forces Browsers to do more Render-Cycles. -> The page loads 2 css files and uses 27 inline css blocks

This is something done automatically by Gatsby and the use of emotion for styling. I don't think we can do something about it but maybe I'm wrong. @svenefftinge What do you think? Thanks

[nisarhassan12]

merge JavaScript into one file to improve page speed: The page loads 9 javascript files and uses 6 inline script blocks

If all the 9 JS files are merged into one file it would make the site even slower. The site does ship more JavaScript then it has to and that is due to the use of Gatsby which uses React, ReactDOM and Reach Router for hydrating, there isn't much we could do about this unless we use something other than Gatsby.

Let's say a user visiting only https://www.gitpod.io/imprint/ a page containing some text and in terms of "The more then what you need is a burden." philosophy he should only be served only some HTML and CSS i.e things that are required for the User Experience but currently, the user landing on the imprint page would be served about 8 JS files which are not required for the User Experience/Goals.

[chrifro]

The current description for gitpod.io i.e the dashboard is Describe your dev environment as code and get fully prebuilt, ready-to-code development environments for any GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket project.

Somewhere there still seems to be the outdated description. See screenshot. Any idea how to find and fix it @nisarhassan12 ?

[nisarhassan12]

• the w3c validator found 61 error(s) and 7 warning(s)

@ChristinFrohne A vast amount of errors reported by the W3C validator are due to the inlining of CSS done by emotion and we can't do anything about that i.e the solution would be to not use emotion(or any other CSS-in-JS library) for styling and that would be a lot of effort. Not sure how much of an impact do these errors have on SEO?

There are some other errors and warnings as well. I'll try to address most of them in #932

[chrifro]

A vast amount of errors reported by the W3C validator are due to the inlining of CSS done by emotion and we can't do anything about that i.e the solution would be to not use emotion(or any other CSS-in-JS library) for styling and that would be a lot of effort. Not sure how much of an impact do these errors have on SEO?

@nisarhassan12 Google says “Although we do recommend using valid HTML, it’s not likely to be a factor in how Google crawls and indexes your site.” As the impact doesn't seem that high and as you said that it takes quite a lot of time to fix it, we can ignore this issue for now.

[ghuntley]

📝 for future iteration lifted from https://github.com/gitpod-io/website/pull/864#issue-532674495

The client.sh script shown in the screenshot has moved in Chocobozzz/PeerTube@c026a2e#diff-f170b9f2b1dbb022fc6aa6f450eb06693d96ab14ddd2711d75585ad4e2bd3751 to /scripts/dev/client.sh.

suggestion: We can update the link to point to the new path or even better link using the permalink to a specific commit to avoid introducing such broken links in the future.