1) It's essentially spam, which Google works to prevent. It seems likely this will actually hurt Mozilla's rank in searches.
2) It's unnecessary. Google's results are usually fine. If you really want a page on Mozilla Dev Center you just add the letters "mdc" to your search, and it's the top result every time.
If I had to chose one single thing at which Google results suck, it would have to be Javascript documentation.
Call me stupid - but I am one of those persons who was unaware of MDC - and to be honest Mozilla sites hierarchy can be hard/impossible to traverse for the un-initiated.
I was wishing so much to find something like that JavaScript Guide. I love JS - but the little intricacies that are common knowledge to greybeards were so hard to find about - now I got it all here.
!!! Yay!
just trying to understand this a bit better, because we are planning on doing an official mozilla mdn affiliate campaign to promote other parts of our documentation.
thanks! - jay, mdn product manager
I'm not saying that I personally am offended by this widget, I don't give a damn. But google might.
Here's how this should be done instead:
* Register a new domain, say javascriptdocs.com or javascriptreference.org
* The new domain should be used for hosting the JS reference as well as the link generator. Using an unrelated domain means you are wasting a lot of links from people that want to support the cause.
* The documentation should get a SEO treatment by someone who knows what he's doing. You need good titles, sensible site structure, a small excerpt to be used on top of each page and in the meta descriptions.
* Contact people and websites that link to bad docs, make them aware of the better docs you are offering and get them to switch.
* A reward program for people that put up links, refer visitors from their website, etc. Give them a Mozilla t-shirt or a hat or something.
it would also pay to look less like a communist movement.
we are definitely looking for ways to improve seo on the mdn/mdc website.
not much has been done in that area for a while, but that is going to change very soon.
- jay, mdn product manager
If there is going to be an effort to improve the actual docs, not just their Google ranking, I would be happy to provide some free consulting on SEO, site structure, usability, promotion, etc. You can find contact information in my profile.
You can refresh if you want to promote a different part of the guide (Arrays, RegExp, etc).
This is a great idea. One of the reasons why JavaScript is frequently misunderstood is because if you search for anything JS related you will find posts explaining how to do some DHTML thing in IE5/6 and Netscape.
It's great that Mozilla considers themselves to be the patron saints of JS, but much of the recent growth in the JS community is due to projects like V8 and node. Why doesn't Joyent or Google get to host the docs on their servers?
Perhaps it's a better idea to establish a Javascript Foundation that runs javascript.org or something. This approach will probably not last and then it'll be a wasted SEO effort.
JavaScript has an admittedly clumsy and unnecessarily Java-like syntax and few built-in functions, I agree. But underneath there is a very elegant functional programming language. Who needs more built-in functions? Most scripting languages' built-in functions are just libraries written in that very language anyway. There's tons of such libraries for JavaScript.
A lot of the recent hype is due to node.js, too. Node.js is (somewhat simplified) a set of evented IO bindings for the V8 JavaScript engine. Those bindings enable us to build webservers using JavaScript. JavaScript was designed to be run in an event loop without any concurrency or blocking, which makes it incredibly easy to build software the scales reasonably well.
That said, I do agree that you should be able to use more languages in the browser. IIRC somebody has already ported Mono to Firefox which allows you to run tons of scripting languages in the browser. The next thing we need is standardization.
First of all, I do it anyway. I constantly promote the MDC resources when ever I write a blog or forum post about some JavaScript thingie.
Secondly, the MDC site itself is not a perfect guide to JavaScript. Just look at the main page - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript - it's overwhelming. Even though I use it frequently, it still makes me feel lost. Plus it has the same academic feel as W3C pages, and you know what... HTML spec is not the first result in google for "html" either.
Compare all this to the w3schools page on JavaScript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp It might not be teaching the best practices, but it sure as hell is a lot clearer than the MDC page.
Therefore I would suggest that MDC guys follow the first rule of SEO: just make a better site.
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Every time I have to use it I am thinking of making a mirror of it.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;">
That said, the search results seem fine for this. [javascript array] turns up this page, albeit at position 9. It also shows w3cschools.com's page on the javascript array at the top, as well as several other great references. The only less than ideal results that I see are the two from javascript-array.com which tends to smell a little over-seo'ed from the fact that the hyphenated domain matches the query.
Thanks. - Jay, MDN product manager
1. That site will naturally get links if and when it exists (natural SEO)
2. It isn’t necessarily the best idea to have it so closely tied with one browser vendor
