Apache Ignite Website SEO Audit Results

[Terry Erisman]

Hi Igniters,

 

We have completed the SEO audit of the Ignite website which was announced earlier this year. Many issues were identified and most have been resolved. There are some open issues that represent opportunities to further improve the website, some of which we will continue to pursue.

 

For those who would like to know what we found, what we fixed, what is still open, and the recommended steps for maintaining the site going forward, I present the following summary of the SEO audit findings:

 

Identified Issues and Recommended Resolutions

 

1 - Canonical Issues

These two canonical issues contributed to Google being able to see and index full duplicate versions of nearly every page on the site. For that reason, this issue had the highest severity.

 

Both the HTTP and HTTPS version of the site were resolving and neither had canonicals placed on them.

·         Recommendation: Ignite uses the HTTPS version as the canonical version of the site, and redirect the HTTP version to the newly chosen canonical version of the site. – Completed

URLs are lacking canonical tags site wide

·         Recommendation: Add canonical tags (mainly self-referencing tags) to all pages that Ignite wants to be indexed. – Completed

2 - URL Crawl Bloat

The API documentation URLs accounted for the largest page directory on ignite.apache.org. Most of these pages were orphaned, but Google had found and indexed around 12,000 of them (likely from articles or webinar links). These pages are nearly identical across various releases with only small changes, causing significant confusion for Google to decide which version to serve.

·         Recommendation -  Noindex all versions except for the latest version of the documentation. In order to allow these documentation pages to be readily accessible to visitors who may want them but not contributing to any duplicate content issues on the site, Ignite should allow users to navigate to older documentation without Google spending too much time crawling and indexing so many of those pages. This also creates a clean landing page structure for the cases where someone is looking for current useful documentation.  – Completed

3 - Meta Tags

Meta Descriptions- No meta descriptions were found on any pages.

·         Recommendation: Determine which pages need meta descriptions and create them. Meta descriptions should be unique and created to draw users in from the SERPs. – Not Started

H1s

·         Most pages do not have H1 tags. H1 tags have a limited effect on SEO, but have a strong effect on user experience metrics like bounce rate.  

o    Recommendation: For every non-documentation page, take the existing H2s and turn them into optimized H1 tags. To take it a step further, optimize these new H1s so that they accurately describe the content of each page.  – Completed

·         Visitors who land directly on a feature or use cases page from Google may not know that the page is a feature or use cases page.

o    Recommendation: Communicate to the visitor that they are on a feature or a use cases page via the H1 or an H2.

Title tag

·         The ignite.apache.org homepage needs a new title tag. Seeing as title tags do have a minor effect on a page’s ranking ability, a title tag of “Apache Ignite” is not descriptive and will not rank for any head terms.

o   Recommendation: It would be useful to add "open source" and "in-memory data memory fabric" terminology. – Completed

·         Title tags site wide are generally poor.

o   Recommendation: Title tags should be reviewed on a page by page level and optimized so that they include key terms and accurately describe the page. It is recommended that the most important keyword is to the left most position of the title tag. For example, the title tag for the news page went from “Apache Ignite – News” to “Latest News - Apache Ignite”. – Completed

 

4 - Sitemap

The XML sitemap was missing many pages and contained some non-important pages.

·         Recommendation: Update the sitemap to include all important URLs and remove pages that 404 or pages that shouldn’t be submitted to Google. – Completed

 

5 - Homepage Links

Some of the text on the homepage uses images rather than regular body text.

·         Recommendation: Use regular body text instead of an image. A user should be able to copy and paste this text. This allows Googlebot to understand what the text is about. – Completed

 

6 - Landing Page Content

Content on most landing pages is light – most landing pages have a lot of potential, but generally contain one image, two paragraphs and then a large glossary of related terms that links out to the readme.io documentation.

·         Recommendation: Deepen the level of content available about the various features and use cases on the actual page. The glossary of features and the related descriptions is helpful, but sharing details about those features with some context would be much more helpful for a user on the page.  – Not Started

7 - Related Domains

A few content issues on ignite.apache.org and related domains were identified.

Apacheignite.gridgain.org

·         Has a variety of content duplicative to that on apacheignite.readme.io. There might also be an issue with hosting all the ignite content on a Gridgain domain. (Note: this was not gridgain.com, but gridgain.org)

·         Recommendation: Remove this site entirely. – Redirected links on gridgain.org to deprecate the site

apacheignite.readme.io

·         There is a lot of content on the readme.io site that could be beneficial to have on the ignite.apache.org site.

o    The drawback of readme.io is that it is not on Ignite's domain.

o    This site may compete with ignite.apache.org on key terms

o    Has content duplicative to that on ignite.apache.com

·         Recommendation: Consider using some of this content to improve some of the top-level landing pages on the ignite site.   – Not Started

 

8 - Blog Content

Blog content lives off-site – The blog content related to apache ignite is generally posted on other sites with the blog page linking out to them. Some blog posts are on the apache.org domain (ex: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-asf-asks-have-you) but no blog posts are on the ignite.apache.org domain. – No Resolution Possible

 

 

Recommended Ongoing Performance Checks

 

The following metrics should be monitored on an ongoing basis:

 

·         Indexation: Perform a site query search in Google to see how many of your pages are in Google’s index. For example, run site:ignite.apache.org

·         Backlinks: You can run your backlinks through Ahrefs, Majestic and/or Open Site Explorer to make sure spammy sites are not linking to you excessively. You can also download backlinks from Google Search Console

o   NOTED: you can run basic backlinks from these tools for free, but to get a comprehensive view, the paid version would be required

·         Monitor Google Web Master Tools:

o   Alerts: Make sure someone is setup to receive alerts when there are new messages. This is where manual penalties would be sent from Google.

o   Search appearance > structured data and HTML improvements: monthly frequency

§  HTML improvements: Look through the duplicate title tags – the most important

§  Look through the 1st page of errors on a monthly basis and go deeper if more bandwidth is available

·         Google index:

o   Index status: monthly basis

o   Content KWs: 3 – 6 months

o   Crawl errors: monthly

o   Crawl stats: monthly

 

As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

 

Best,

 

Terry

 

Terry Erisman

[hidden email]