August 2020 Newsletter
Summary
Introducing our new indexing manager, we’d appreciate your input to our results page redesign, and a few friendly reminders.
Team Announcement
We Welcome Our New Indexing Manager
Carter Baxter, who has been serving as Chief of Practices for 18F, has joined the Search.gov team as its Indexing Manager on detail. Carter has extensive experience as a developer and will support our customers with all indexing related inquiries and requests. Welcome Carter!
Your Input Requested
Search Results Page Redesign : We Need Your Help
As part of the work we are doing to redesign our search results pages, we are trying to survey how many sites use the two different USWDS header options. And for this part, we need your help! Please respond to this two-question survey to share which header option you’re using for your site. Thank you in advance for your time and help with this request!
Not able to use Google Forms? Email us at search@gsa.gov.
Friendly Reminder
Tell Us about Upcoming Site Redesigns
Do you have a site redesign in the works? Congrats! Please give us advance notice so we can make sure your results are ready at relaunch: there are a number of back-end tasks we’ll need to do with you, such as reindexing your previous content and getting the new results ready to go at launch time.
Best - tell us a month or more ahead of launch
Good - tell us two weeks ahead of launch
OK but not great - tell us a few days ahead of launch
We will definitely still help you - it slips your mind and you remember after launch when you see the results are still from the old website.
Read through our Checklist for a Successful Website Redesign and let us know if you have any questions, or an upcoming launch!
SEO Pro Tip
Encode Your URLs
In order for URLs to be properly handled, they must use only ASCII characters. This means that special characters and non-ASCII characters must be transformed, or encoded. Currently we see about 5% of domains are including unencoded characters in some of their sitemap URLs. Here are some examples of the kinds of characters that can cause errors, and the proper way each should be written in a URL:
| Character | UTF-8 Encoded version |
|---|---|
| ñ | %C3%B1 |
| ] | %5D |
| “ “ (Space character) | %20 |
Read more on ASCII encoding of characters
Read more details from the XML Sitemaps Protocol
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.