SEO by making Food Oasis web-crawler-compatible

[fancyham]

Summary: FOLA barely appears on search engines. Why? Because our org listings are not visible to Google's web crawler.

Only about 6 of our pages appear in Google’s search results — the static ones like About Us, but none of the dynamic ones like our org listings.

Let's get our 300+ org listings to appear on Google. Details below.

As it is now

Our food-provider/pantry/meal program detail pages don't show up in Google search results meaning that our site is not being indexed by web crawlers from Google or Archive.org.

This is a problem for food-seekers, for our visibility in search engines, and for historical/archival purposes.

Our site seems to currently require human interaction to get to listings which means that our food-provider info pages aren't being crawled or indexed by search engines. This is probably partially due to the React-based user interface.

Goal

To allow people to find listings using Google and other search engines, we should consider creating a 'flat' version of our site that bots can crawl and index.

This might be a single page (with an invisible link) with deep links to each of our organization data pages. Those data pages should also be crawlable without requiring the react framework.

Use Cases

• Someone googles for “food pantries in west covina” — it’d be great to have a FOLA list of neighborhood pantries appear in Google’s search results.
• Someone searches for “My friends house food pantry address” — goal is that the FOLA listing for “My Friend’s House LA” appears as one of the search results.

Background

Archive.org uses web-crawlers to visit and make copies of entire sites for posterity, however it seems our site is not compatible with web-crawlers. This means that while our landing pages are available, food-provider detail pages are not archived. https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/foodoasis.la

These archives and search engine indexes are important for two reasons

• SEO: So people can find direct links to our content based on searching for an org name, for example.
• Archival purposes: So that we or others can see old versions of our data.

There is a small risk that Google may scrape our info and pull our data into their maps engine, but since our goal is to connect people with food, that's a risk we can/should take.

Action Items

• [ ] Consider: are we being bad internet citizens if we put listings and their info online? I think not, but let's think about it.
• [ ] Evaluate if our site is indexable by archive.org and google. Try searches using content from one of our food-provider-org pages. Another way to check: does our site work when javascript is disabled?
• [ ] Come up with solutions that would make our site indexable, with deep links to content, so that when people search on an org name, that one of our detail pages is in the search results. It doesn't have to be pretty.
• [ ] Implement solutions

[staceyrebekahscott]

@Nechir-89 In the future, if you would like to work on an issue that is in the New Approval column, please let one of the PMs know so we can assess and prioritize properly. I am approving this and moving to In Progress.

[Nechir-89]

@staceyrebekahscott thanks for letting me know it, seems you changed the way developers are assigned to an issue because we were usually talk to team leaders (John and Hannah) before stepping up with new issues.

[staceyrebekahscott]

@Nechir-89 No worries, and there may be some workflow conflicts going on here. I'll get that sorted out with the Leads so there is no confusion.