[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #5813: Retire support profile pages

[Making WordPress.org]

#5813: Retire support profile pages
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 Reporter:  jonoaldersonwp  |      Owner:  (none)
     Type:  defect          |     Status:  new
 Priority:  high            |  Milestone:
Component:  Profiles        |   Keywords:  seo performance
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 Every wp.org user gets ''two'' profile pages; a legacy 'forums' profile
 (e.g., https://wordpress.org/support/users/jonoaldersonwp/), and a page on
 the 'profiles' subdomain (e.g.,
 https://profiles.wordpress.org/jonoaldersonwp/).

 We should retire the former, in favour of the latter.

 == SEO challenges
 From an SEO perspective, the sheer quantity of pages which Google has to
 discover, crawl through, and then dismiss, takes much-needed crawl budget
 from elsewhere on the site (at the time of writing, there are 30k forum
 pages which Google knows about, but hasn't yet crawled).

 Furthermore, the legacy forums profile contains a series of sub-pages
 (e.g., https://wordpress.org/support/users/jonoaldersonwp/topics/,
 https://wordpress.org/support/users/jonoaldersonwp/reviews/), which
 collectively result in ''millions'' of thin, low-quality, and duplicate
 pages.

 We've mitigated the impact somewhat through robots and canonical controls,
 but this doesn't fix the underlying problem. It also doesn't address the
 UI/UX challenge and confusion which undoubtedly impacts our users, nor the
 performance/systems impact of maintaining and serving 10x the volume of
 pages that we need to.

 Whilst these pages continue to exist, they'll continue to cripple other
 parts of wp.org.

 == Actions

 I appreciate that there's undoubtedly complexity and legacy challenges
 that I don't have visibility of. Regardless, however, we need to:
 - Make sure that the profiles subdomain has equivalent/full functionality
 (for moderators/admins and users) so that the ''support'' profiles can be
 retired
 - 301 redirect support profiles to subdomain profiles
 - (eventually) update all template-level internal linking to the new
 URLs(s)

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5813>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
Making WordPress.org