SPIKE: SEO

[r-bartlett-gsa]

As a Challenge.gov and/or CitizenScience.gov user, in order to be able to access site pages and content efficiently, I would like relevant site pages to come up in search results.

Acceptance criteria:

• Investigate and draft best practices recommendation for robots.txt setup
• Investigate and draft best practices recommendation for sitemap.xml setup
• Investigate and draft best practices recommendations for noindex and canonical tags
• Review the following sites:
  • challenge.gov
  • portal.challenge.gov
  • citizenscience.gov

Additional questions and resources to look into:

• Consideration: remove noindex tag from print preview pages and add a canonical tag, indicating that a challenge page is the main page for search results
• Question: why there's a canonical tag on the challenge page?
• Why is this page publicly accessible? Should it have a redirect? https://portal.challenge.gov/public
• Why challenge.gov robots and sitemap is considered missing? https://scangov.org/profile/?domain=challenge.gov#/
• Why citizenscience.gov robots and sitemap is considered missing? https://scangov.org/profile/?domain=citizenscience.gov#/
• Why challenge.gov robots.txt is not fully setup? Why citizenscience.gov robots.txt is set to disallow?
• Do we have access to challenge.gov and citizenscience.gov Google search console? on the PMO side?
• sitemap resources
• noindex tag resources
• canonical tag resources
• robots resources