People searching online should be able to find a WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more., by searching for that WordCamp’s name at the very least. Unfortunately at the moment, Google isn’t even indexing some of our WordCamp sites. See this example, for WordCamp Torino. You won’t be able to find it in Google. Or this, for the already past WordCamp Glasgow. We need to fix this.
Why isn’t Google indexing these sites?
We are not blocking Google from accessing these sites. The problem we have is that Google treats each of these subdomains as a separate site. And since it’s a subdomain of a subdomain it doesn’t deem it very important. In technical terms, it’s a matter of crawl budget. Each site, because they’re each different subdomains and thus new sites, has to gather enough links for Google to deem it worthy of indexing.
Honestly, the solution is very simple to explain (albeit probably a fair bit of work to implement): instead of making a new subdomain for every year of every WordCamp, we should switch to the extreme opposite of the model. We think https://2020.torino.wordcamp.org/ should become https://wordcamp.org/torino/2020/. In fact, it would be even better if we could make https://wordcamp.org/torino/ the homepage, all the time, of that WordCamp, with sub-pages having the year of the event in the permalink. Previous years homepages could then live on https://wordcamp.org/torino/2019/ etc.
The homepage of WordCamp.org should be what is now https://central.wordcamp.org/. The result of this would be that every WordCamp in the world benefits from every other succesful WordCamp, in terms of reach, links, etc. It could still be a multi-site, all these WordCamps could still have their own themes, style, etc.
This is as “simple” as flicking the switch and creating redirects for these sites, so the old version 301 redirects to the new. I’d prefer for those redirects to be handled serverside as this is going to be creating a fair amount of them. I’m fairly positive that within months of doing this we’d suddenly see all those new sites indexed.
Speaker pages
Right now, every camp has to create new speaker pages for all their speakers, even when a lot of these speakers speak on more than one WordCamp. How about we turn it around: we tie sessions on WordCamp sites to profile.wordpress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ pages.
More SEO
There’s more SEO to be done on these sites, much more, and I honestly would not want to do that without an SEO plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. As you may know I am the original author of Yoast SEO and I’m thus very biased on what would be the best plugin for these sites. I think it’s best fit for this purpose and we’d love to invest the time needed into fixing all the other SEO things that need fixing, of course after discussion with the team. But that’s for later. First, let’s get these subdomains rolled into one main domain.
