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[EPIC] A/B test section snippets
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

Background

Search engines have been experimenting with surfacing subsection links and snippets for structured pages. Their goals are to make it easier for users to find the most relevant section of a page for their search. We would like to test whether allowing our content to be displayed as snippets affects readership metrics

Acceptance criteria

  • Add "max-snippets" meta tag to a subset of pages on the following wikis:
    • English
    • Spanish
    • French
    • Portuguese
    • Arabic
    • Hindi
    • Bengali
    • Indonesian
    • Japanese
    • Russian
  • Analyze data

Event Timeline

ovasileva added a project: SEO.

@ovasileva do you have the code we have to add to the pages handy?
From the docs (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/robots_meta_tag#max-snippet)

To allow up to 20 characters to be shown in the snippet:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:20">

To specify that there's no limit on the number of characters that can be shown in the snippet:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1">

which one are we using for the purpose of the A/B test?

@ovasileva do you have the code we have to add to the pages handy?
From the docs (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/robots_meta_tag#max-snippet)

To allow up to 20 characters to be shown in the snippet:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:20">

To specify that there's no limit on the number of characters that can be shown in the snippet:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1">

which one are we using for the purpose of the A/B test?

@jrobson - we would like the limit to be 400 characters, so <meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:400"> vs not having the tag at all

ovasileva changed the task status from Open to Stalled.May 31 2022, 5:34 PM

@ovasileva to check what happened here with partnerships and decide whether this can be declined/resolved.
~~We should also evaluate whether this code should be retained or removed before closing out: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core/+/f6af87d3353a1791ba497f144b29d4217dce05a8/tests/phpunit/includes/Output/OutputPageTest.php#749~~ looks like no code cleanup needed here. It appears to have already happened.

No longer relevant