mozilla
Decrease Search Engine findability of old Release Notes and System Requirements; increase findability of Security Advisories
There several thousand old Release Notes, System Requirement pages, and Security Advisories published on en-US. Most of these pages have not had any pageviews or organic search referrals in months or years.
Pages that are indexed but which never receive any visitors are of low value to search engine users, and therefore to search engines. Websites that have a lot of low-value pages do not rank overall as well as websites that have few low-value pages.
In my experience, reducing the number of low-value pages that Google crawls and indexes can increase the visibility and traffic to the remaining high-value pages. So, while we do not want to reduce on-site discoverability of pages that have a value to our website visitors, it is generally worthwhile to keep Google out of them.
TL;dr
Although there is probably value to continuing to make old RN and SR pages available, their presence in search results seems to have misdirected far more people than it has helped. I recommend de-indexing older pages and only making the most recent version findable. At the same time, I think it might be helpful to make the .../firefox/releases/ page easier to get to, by linking to it from RN pages. (If there is a similar summary page for SR I cannot find it.)
The simplest way to accomplish that is, as each RN and SR page is displaced by a new version, to add a Meta Robots tag to the old page with the values noindex, nofollow. The Releases page should have the values index, nofollow, so that the Releases page itself is more findable.
As for the SAs, those see small amounts of intentional traffic for months after publication, even after newer SAs have been published. I think it would make sense to add nofollow link elements to SAs on the /advisories/ page that are more than a year old, and to noindex those older pages. I think this greater focus may make the new SAs more findable.
Supporting Data: Website Views and Organic Search traffic
Over the past 28 days, 1690 Release Notes pages had 1M pageviews; only 8 URLs received over 10k views (pages for 115, 118, and 119). There were 70k clicks to RN pages from organic search; of the 887 pages that received clicks, only 12 of them got more than 1000 clicks. The clicks were from queries such as "firefox 119" and "firefox latest version". There were 13 queries that asked specifically for release notes, consisting of fewer than 200 clicks. Given the data, it seems likely only 0.02% of the clicks from search were from people who were looking for the release notes, and the other 99.98% of clicks were from people who wanted to download latest version of firefox.
During the same period, 110 System Requirements pages had 94k pageviews; only 4 URLs received over 10k views (pages for 118, 119, and 32). There were 46k clicks to SR pages from organic search. Of the 594 pages that received clicks, only 4 of them got more than 1000 clicks. The most popular search that droves clicks was "mozilla firefox download for windows 7 32-bit"; the remaining 9 top queries also referred to windows 32. There were 8 queries total that referred specifically to system requirements, for fewer than 200 total clicks. Given the data, not only is it likely that very few people actually wanted to see system requirements, it is also likely that most of the clicks were from people who wanted to download a specific version of firefox.
Also during the same period, 552 Security Advisory pages had 12k pageviews; none of them received over 10k views. There were 3,600 clicks to SA pages from organic search. Of the 510 pages that received clicks, none of them got more than 1000 clicks. The most popular search was "cve-2023-4863 firefox". So, it seems that people who are finding these pages have actually been looking for them. Furthermore, although search volume tapers off over time, it lasts for multiple months, even after new advisories are published.
Success Criteria
- [ ] An element contributing to the definition of done for the card
- [ ] Tasks should be represented here as something like "Approved designs attached to this issue"
