Promote JS

by evilhackerdude • 16 years ago

100 40 16 years ago

MisterWebz• 16 years ago

Why do we only get to promote a certain part of the JS documentation instead of the general JS guide (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide) ?

liamk• 16 years ago

I find that w3schools also offers great documentation for JavaScript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp .

daleharvey2• 16 years ago

the w3c documentation is terrible, I mean the first function you see on the home page is document.write

jarin• 16 years ago

It gives you a random part of the guide with the appropriate keywords in the title attribute of the link, so that each part of the guide gets boosted in the search rankings appropriately.

You can refresh if you want to promote a different part of the guide (Arrays, RegExp, etc).

bobds2• 16 years ago

This site generates a link to a random page of the Mozilla Javascript reference, with various keywords added in title and alt attributes. It would be better if they used text instead of an image as the link anchor.

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.

keyle• 16 years ago

Good stuff...

it would also pay to look less like a communist movement.

pjscott• 16 years ago

I don't think many people worry about robot dinosaur communists, now that the Cold War is over.

Qz• 16 years ago

Communists are so 1989, nobody really cares anymore.

jaybhai3• 16 years ago

thanks bobds.

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

bobds2• 16 years ago

Those are just a few hastily written thoughts.

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.

jhuckestein4• 16 years ago

Keeping this on the frontpage will help as well :)

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.

srwh• 16 years ago

I am one who doesn't really understand javascript hype (and have used it in advanced ways), there are few types, objects are automatically converted to strings, few functions support even for the web (urlparse). I am in favor of a VM to the web, supporting more programming languages.

jhuckestein4• 16 years ago

I'd be interested to know by what standards you asses programing languages.

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.

jacobolus2• 16 years ago

If Google wants to write some better docs, that’s their prerogative. MDC has good docs that exist, today.

joevandyk• 16 years ago

Why can't I zoom in on that site on an iPad?

gojomo2• 16 years ago

Probably this in the <head>:

bigfudge• 16 years ago

Perhaps I'm asking the wrong person, but what is that trying to achieve?

lars2• 16 years ago

This is a bad idea.

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.

jhuckestein4• 16 years ago

Agreed on 1). It's not unnecessary though. If you don't know what mdc is, you can't search for it. JavaScript is often said to be the most misunderstood programming language. I think this is because there is no definitive, easily findable resource on it.

daleharvey2• 16 years ago

the point is you need to add mdc, people searching for javascript that do not know about mdc get sent to barely related sites at best, but more often misleading and wrong documentation

DuncanIdaho• 16 years ago

Oh my god... This is so awesome!

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!

olalonde• 16 years ago

Google's results are usually fine.

If I had to chose one single thing at which Google results suck, it would have to be Javascript documentation.

jaybhai3• 16 years ago

lars: can you explain #1 a bit more? how is a simple widget/affiliate button spam?

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

lars2• 16 years ago

As I understand it, the point of this is to manipulate how MDC ranks in google searches. A lot of people try to do this, and google works to prevent it. What I'm saying is that google's algorithms might see this sudden rise in links coming from sites with potentially widely different content, consider it unnatural, and classify it as spam. They also might not, I certainly don't know the details of their spam prevention algorithm.

I'm not saying that I personally am offended by this widget, I don't give a damn. But google might.

walkon• 16 years ago

Googling for 'javascript' brings up some sites about javascript, such as Wikipedia and Crockford's, along with some not so good tutorial-ish sites. The only really bad thing I see is the java.com reference at number three. Searching for 'javascript documentation' or 'javascript docs' pulls up the MDC doc site. Not sure why this is that big of a deal. I don't see a need for enlisting "the community" to drive SEO here.

gregable• 16 years ago

It would go much further for the mozilla development center to do a little basic, white-hat, on-page SEO. For example, this URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global... has a title of "Array - MDC". Even when it does come up in search results, most users wouldn't have context from the title what it's about. "MDC" adds nothing to the title. Words like "JavaScript" or "documentation" might help. Similarly, "documentation" isn't even on the page, and "Javascript" is first found halfway down the page and mostly in extra small text.

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.

jaybhai3• 16 years ago

We are going to be doing some basic SEO very soon, but some of the current issues are due to the wiki platform we are using. We'll be investigating way to improve the overall markup for all docs.

Thanks. - Jay, MDN product manager

nene• 16 years ago

I don't really buy all this big campaign to promote MDC.

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.

nowarninglabel• 16 years ago

Not to mention they don't seem to be scaling well:

"Service Unavailable

The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."

emilis_info• 16 years ago

I use MDC reference rather often and their loooong response times and occasional "Service Unavailable" messages annoy me very much.

Every time I have to use it I am thinking of making a mirror of it.

alanh• 16 years ago

It’s a great idea to have a comprehensive and user-friendly standard place to look for JavaScript information. Just two problems:

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

Promote JS

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