Making the ABP website searchable

Discussion on adblockplus.org website and translations
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alberto
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 10:58 am

Making the ABP website searchable

Post by alberto »

I'm wondering how discoverable are the localized ABP website pages when using a search engine like Google

I just tried searching "Adblock Plus" on Google and forced results in Spanish. The first result was AMO (Spanish version) as expected, but the ABP website did not appear. I would have thought Google would have already crawled and indexed the Spanish version after few days online.

Looks like the ABP website serves HTML pages tagged with "en" language regardless of the language selected.

For example
es/
still delivers this

Code: Select all

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">
Maybe this has an impact?

[BTW, my browser locale is en-US, so cannot confirm for sure if this is working or not for a Spanish audience]

Edit: Actually French and German pages are served with the correct lang tag, so I guess it's a matter of configuring the new languages
Wladimir Palant

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by Wladimir Palant »

alberto wrote:I would have thought Google would have already crawled and indexed the Spanish version after few days online.
Yes, Google has this page in his cache. But its ranking is low because nobody links to it yet. Which will change in due time, just not overnight.
alberto wrote:For example
es/
still delivers this

Code: Select all

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">
My bad - Anwiki doesn't have a language file for Spanish and I forgot to add one so it used English as fallback. Fixed.
alberto
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 10:58 am

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by alberto »

Thanks

The AMO page e.g. Spanish version refers to the ABP website as https://adblockplus.org/

When a user clicks there, does it automatically switch to localized version e.g. Spanish depending on the browser locale?

Is this meant to be updated at some point to the language-specific home page e.g. es for Spanish? I suppose this could help improve the search ranking of localized ABP pages? That means that people on different regions will be able to see that the website is available in their native language.
Wladimir Palant

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by Wladimir Palant »

alberto wrote:The AMO page e.g. Spanish version refers to the ABP website as https://adblockplus.org/

When a user clicks there, does it automatically switch to localized version e.g. Spanish depending on the browser locale?
Not yet, will update server configuration soon. AMO link will be updated as well.
Wladimir Palant

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by Wladimir Palant »

Server configuration has been updated, now going to https://adblockplus.org/ will redirect the user to the correct language version depending on his language preferences (in Firefox options, under Content / Languages). The server isn't flexible enough for a fully correct processing of that header so only the top entry in the list is being considered - that should be good enough in most scenarios however (particularly in all the default configurations).
alberto
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 10:58 am

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by alberto »

Thanks for looking into this.

I'd love to see ABP growing in my community, to foster a better ecosystem with users and subscription maintainers focused on sites in my region.

When searching for the equivalent 'remove ads' etc in Spanish, I've noticed that ABP is not well positioned (not even AMO).

In addition to providing a quality service and relevant content, there are guidelines to help the site perform better in search results. I think the ABP site could benefit from having a homepage with a good mix of keyword phrases, description meta tag, etc. For example, in English, Google shows the following snippet: "Blocks advertising, banners and other unwanted stuff on websites." but I have not seen an equivalent for other languages e.g. Spanish.

In order to promote ABP in other regions, do you think this research on search optimization will worth pursuing at this stage? Or would you rely more on AMO, word-of-mouth, organic growth, etc?
Wladimir Palant

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by Wladimir Palant »

alberto wrote:I think the ABP site could benefit from having a homepage with a good mix of keyword phrases, description meta tag, etc.
I don't think search engines care much about meta tags these days - they have been abused way too much.
alberto wrote:For example, in English, Google shows the following snippet: "Blocks advertising, banners and other unwanted stuff on websites." but I have not seen an equivalent for other languages e.g. Spanish.
I googled for this phrase to figure out where it came from :)
This is apparently the source: http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/ ... x/Add-ons/. I guess you could try suggesting the Spanish Adblock Plus homepage - even though they don't even have a Spanish add-ons list yet (even the German list has only two links).
In order to promote ABP in other regions, do you think this research on search optimization will worth pursuing at this stage? Or would you rely more on AMO, word-of-mouth, organic growth, etc?
Organic growth served us well so far. Now that we do have content in Spanish I am pretty confident that the ranking on Spanish Google will improve soon.
alberto
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 10:58 am

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by alberto »

Okay, let's wait and see

The Spanish version in AMO has been around for a while but does not rank well when searching for a generic term e.g. 'quitar publicidad' (remove ads). You would not know ABP exists unless you search for 'Adblock' or 'Adblock Plus'.

The 'adblock' term would not be widely used by non-English and/or non-technical savvy audience, so the ideally the content should explicitly include other searchable keywords. Currently the add-on description (Spanish version) does not explicitly include common keywords like 'quitar publicidad' (remove ads), just one reference to 'eliminar la publicidad' (variant of remove ads) that seems to be a less popular query. Anyway, the seach engines may be intelligent enough to make the connections between terms.

According to this (page 6), the description meta tag could be used by Google to show a snippet. Otherwise could get a site description from the Open Source Project, which is what is happening.
Wladimir Palant

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by Wladimir Palant »

Ok - es/_include/metadata is where you translate the meta tags. The description doesn't need to be a literal translation (e.g. my German translation is only slightly related to the English version), keywords can also be replaced by different terms if it makes sense (I replaced "content blocker" by "SeaMonkey" in German - more relevant).
alberto
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 10:58 am

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by alberto »

Thanks for this

A couple of findings

* descriptions meta tag -- could be used by Google to display snippets, but will not impact the ranking within search results. Google suggests to differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Not sure if this should go to the homepage alone?

* Keywords meta tag -- is completely ignored by Google

During the website restructure and redesign of the homepage, we could make sure that relevant keywords are included as part of the content.
Wladimir Palant

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by Wladimir Palant »

Ok, all changes reverted, now the <meta> tags are part of the start page - and only that page. I moved the existing content.

Google and keywords - yes, that's pretty much what I remembered. Other search engines still seem to use them so let's keep them. But having them anywhere other than the start page makes little sense I guess.
alberto
Posts: 65
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 10:58 am

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by alberto »

In regards to having the AMO link to the localized home page, will this be done for the next ABP release? or can be done in advance?

On a side note, looking at the ABP description in AMO (specially for non-english versions). I think it may work better to drive users directly to the ABP website, instead of the youtube video in english which does not lead to any other source of documentation.
Wladimir Palant

Re: Making the ABP website searchable

Post by Wladimir Palant »

alberto, this description (and the homepage link but that one will probably be automated) is being managed on Babelzilla, could you send your suggestions directly to the translator? For es-ES it is http://www.babelzilla.org/forum/index.php?showuser=247, for es-AR http://www.babelzilla.org/forum/index.p ... user=14557.
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