and other general nonsense
Interesting results. When searching for “atg documentation” in google, this site shows up in the #3 (mirror) and #5 spots. ATG shows up as #1, but you have to register and login to view the docs, so a search engine won’t actually index the meat of the documentation.
awesome.
I’m conducting a little SEO experiment. I’ve posted links to the ATG 2006.3 Platform Documentation from the ATG site, and a local copy of the ATG 2006.3 Platform Documentation and am interested in seeing if search engines pick them up. I want to see if Google (for example) finds the docs, and then ranks them highly in search results.
It has always driven me nuts that ATG doesn’t post their documentation in a place that search engines can index. It also drives me nuts that the ATG search applet doesn’t like the back button - you have to re-search.
So, lets see what happens given the sorta-unprotected-atg-documentation-link-i-found-on-the-atg-site-this-morning and the copy of the docs I downloaded. I’m sure ATG will plug the unprotected docs at some point, and possibly complain that I’ve posted them online, but it really will make life better for ATG developers everywhere. Really.
The Nabble ATG Dynamo Forum actually generates posts and is indexed - which is a refreshing change, welcome to Web 1.0… let the good times roll.
Update - I changed the local link back to ATG. The traffic was killing me!
I use ATG often enough to know that they had a fairly brilliant tool a few years ago, but they seem to have lost their motivation to innovate and replaced it with a big need to productize and seemingly confuse potential buyers. One of the big issues I see from a user/developer standpoint is the lack of support material available online. ATG has much information available on their website, but what frustrates me is that it’s hidden from search engines like google because you are required to login to view it.
The result of this is two-fold. Developers have no real resources to help solve issues, and customers have nowhere to look for relevant information. I suppose this is more of an issue for developers than customers, but for a company that pioneered JSP pages and developed a spring like architecture over 6 years ago, it seems as though the technical brilliance at the company was held back by the business.
Case in point: If you search for “ATG 2006.3″ in google, most of the top 10 results are me working through installation issues for MySQL and OSX. Which gives me great insight into google search engine optimization methods, but leaves me with an empty feeling when faced with solving complicated ATG development issues.