The wiki doesn't appear on internet searches

[ryvnf]

I've noticed that the Deskthority wiki doesn't appear in internet searches anymore. Previously I remember it showing up near the top when searching for specific information on keyboards or switches. This was a great way to find information and what eventually led me to this forum. Now it doesn't even show up when searching for "Deskthority wiki". I assume this is after the forum update some time ago.

This community has a lot to gain by exposure of the wiki. So it would probably be good to investigate the reason for this and attempt to fix it.

Atleast this is the case for me when using Google or DuckDuckGo.

[ZedTheMan]

I have also experienced this issue and have found it rather frustrating when I am looking for a model of keyboard or switch quickly.
I need to go to the Main DT site and then the wiki, and then find the page I'm looking for there.

[Muirium]

Same here. The Cherry MX entry in the wiki used to be, by far, DT’s most visited page. I remember Webwit once saying that the rest of the world saw us as a wiki with a forum attached. But how would they now, when we’re nowhere to be found?

Google is Satan, so be it. But even DuckDuckGo doesn’t list us? The problem must be our end.

The problem may be deep. Matteo says we are down a technological dead end with phpBB. If it has killed our stream of visitors, we are in a dead end indeed.

[swampangel]

I tried some google searches, and for a couple like "alps skcc" and "clare pendar keyboards" the dt wiki was still the first result. I did it in incognito mode, but google's tracking could still be having an effect.

On DuckDuckGo, no dice, even with a string like "alps skcc deskthority wiki"

I notice no preview text is included in the google result. Missing meta description tags? An overly restrictive robots.txt?

[bhtooefr]

I'd venture a guess that nothing with phpBB would be affecting the wiki, as that's a separate software package (MediaWiki).

Doesn't look like there's any robots.txt being served by the forum, either...

[matt3o]

it could be a misconfiguration on the webserver, but honestly searching specifically inside the wiki (eg: cherry mx site:deskthority.net/wiki) the pages are indeed indexed.

I'll look into it but I don't see why it shouldn't work

[matt3o]

okay it seems wiki.deskthority.net at some point in time was redirecting to the wrong url, that was rectified long ago but still google has a bunch of wrong links indexed. I added some forceful redirects to see if that helps.

Regarding the indexing of anything under /wiki I'm a bit out of clues. Everything seems fine on the server side.

[bhtooefr]

I wonder if the Google Search Console says anything useful...

[matt3o]

I think I got it. I believe mediawiki for some reason bans "Googlebot smartphone" crawler. I don't know exactly where it is actually banned (server or application level, and if application hardcoded or config) so I'll have to dig into that

[ZedTheMan]

Godspeed, matt3o, it will be good to be able to find the wiki regularly in keyboard searches again.

[matt3o]

I checked everything and fixed a few configuration issues that I spotted while I was there (nothing crucial but please report if you experience any issue).

Problem is mediawiki for no reason bans googlebot, there's a new mediawiki version available maybe it was a bug? I'll try to update as soon as possible

[Muirium]

The Wiki's acting up:

viewtopic.php?p=451255#p451255

[matt3o]

This was one of the most painful debug I had to do on DT. The error was caused by a series of circumstances that are so specific to our site that google search was of no help at all (and you know it when you get only 3 results and 2 of them are in Russian).

Anyway I believe it is fixed now. The good news is that I had to recheck all our configs and had the opportunity to update and correct them (we had a lot of leftovers after various wiki updates).

It is likely that you'll be logged out of the wiki the first time you visit. Re-login and everything should be fine.

Please report of any issue.