Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-46.39.53.83-20200213005426

Andrewds1021 wrote: 46.39.53.83 wrote:

Andrewds1021 wrote: It isn't a bug; the change was intentional. As explained in earlier posts, the change was made to improve the ranking of wikis in search engine (primarily Google) results. Because Google is such a large search engine, their decisions on how to rank sites can drive massive trends in website design. This is what is happening. Another example is the trend towards mobile-friendly (potentially desktop-unfriendly) websites. And if you brainlessly follow that trends you just drive users away from your websites because nobody wants to deal with negative changes and decreasing user experience quality. If you don't understand it now - I wish you'll be forced to understand it later when devs of your beloved site start treating you as a scum. Where will they go? I would bet most people decide on sites based on what Google suggests to them. To any other site with better usability.

I suppose it's only 50% correct. If you are talking about random visitors - then yes, google suggestions are a big deal: "I wanna know about character or term from movie/game/book. *searches* Oh, there's whole encyclopedia about it!"

But if you are talking about people who visit one site many and many times - they don't need to google it and rely on rankings and stuff.

And back to the topic: Okay, devs wanna redirect search engine bots from file pages to content pages. But why living people who intentionally try to load file pages should be thrown somewhere they didn't want to or just back to the previous page?