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Promote JS
- MisterWebz 16y agoWhy 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 https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide) ?
- liamk 16y agoI find that w3schools also offers great documentation for JavaScript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp .
- daleharvey 16y agothe w3c documentation is terrible, I mean the first function you see on the home page is document.write
- jacobolus 16y agoI don't think w3schools has any affiliation with the W3C. But I agree with you, their documentation is terrible: bad examples, idiosyncratic code conventions, confusing layout, (no syntax highlighting,) lots of distracting ads, and very little of the "what are the corner cases", "how does this work in every browser", &c. details that are essential in this type of resource.
- jarin 16y agoIt 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).
- bobds 16y agoThis 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 16y agoGood stuff... it would also pay to look less like a communist movement.
- jaybhai 16y agothanks 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
- bobds 16y agoThose 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.
- jhuckestein 16y agoKeeping 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 16y agoI 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.
- jhuckestein 16y agoI'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.
- effn 16y ago
- joevandyk 16y agoWhy can't I zoom in on that site on an iPad?
- gojomo 16y agoProbably this in the <head>: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;">
- bigfudge 16y agoPerhaps I'm asking the wrong person, but what is that trying to achieve?
- gojomo 16y agoThey must think their sizing/font choices are good enough for everyone, so they've essentially stopped zooming. Used properly, the META viewport should help pages adapt to smaller screens. For example, I think an iPhone-specific viewport setting would make the HN front-page more legible on iPhones by wrapping submission titles. Unfortunately, lots of sites seem to pick settings that either don't work well on all mobile devices (like assuming iOS dimensions even for non-iOS devices) or prevent native zooming (Google mobile sites and the default WordPress mobile theme are offenders here).
- lars 16y agoThis 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.
- jhuckestein 16y agoAgreed 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.
- daleharvey 16y agothe 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 16y agoOh 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!
- walkon 16y agoGoogling 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 16y agoIt 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_Objects/Array 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.
- jaybhai 16y agoWe 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 16y agoI 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 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 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 16y agoNot to mention they don't seem to be scaling well: "Service Unavailable The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."
- emilis_info 16y agoI 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 16y agoIt’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