Promote JS

This 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.<p>Here's how this should be done instead:<p>* Register a new domain, say javascriptdocs.com or javascriptreference.org<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* Contact people and websites that link to bad docs, make them aware of the better docs you are offering and get them to switch.<p>* 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.

I don't really buy all this big campaign to promote MDC.<p>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.<p>Secondly, the MDC site itself is not a perfect guide to JavaScript. Just look at the main page - <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript</a> - 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.<p>Compare all this to the w3schools page on JavaScript: <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp</a> It might not be teaching the best practices, but it sure as hell is a lot clearer than the MDC page.<p>Therefore I would suggest that MDC guys follow the first rule of SEO: just make a better site.

This is a bad idea.<p>1) It's essentially spam, which Google works to prevent. It seems likely this will actually hurt Mozilla's rank in searches.<p>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.

Googling 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.

Why do we only get to promote a certain part of the JS documentation instead of the general JS guide (<a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide</a>) ?

It would go much further for the mozilla development center to do a little basic, white-hat, on-page SEO. For example, this URL: <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...</a> 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.<p>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.

It’s a great idea to have a comprehensive and user-friendly standard place to look for JavaScript information. Just two problems:<p>1. That site will naturally get links if and when it exists (natural SEO)<p>2. It isn’t necessarily the best idea to have it so closely tied with one browser vendor

Keeping this on the frontpage will help as well :)<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.

Why can't I zoom in on that site on an iPad?