BaseUrl banner: make the message configurable please Google/SEO/indexers

[Morriz]

🚀 Feature

Currently this message is indexed (google it) on ALL sites using docusaurus:

"Your Docusaurus site did not load properly."

It would be nice to let us configure that message so that we at least have some control over our crawl presence on the web.

Have you read the [Contributing Guidelines on issues]

yes

[slorber]

Thanks for reporting this.

Can you explain how this affects your site exactly?

I mean, no one is googling for "Your Docusaurus site did not load properly.", so how did you find it was a problem, and how customizing the message will solve it?

Maybe we should also add an opt-in option to remove it?

[Morriz]

I see a lot of docusaurus doc sites be indexed by google that way, probably since it is hosted as static only.

I was just offering you to search for that exact string so you can see the scale of the problem.

Maybe crawlers can be told to ONLY index meta description instead of that message, but I am not very deep into html specs any more...

[slorber]

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Your+Docusaurus+site+did+not+load+properly.%22&rlz=1C5CHFA_enFR749FR749&oq=%22Your+Docusaurus+site+did+not+load+properly.%22&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.4303j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

I do agree that these Docusaurus 2 sites get indexed in an unexpected way, and we should likely offer a way to disable that.

I just wonder why specifically it is a problem for you and your users?
How does it impact your business/SEO in a concrete way?
What did a regular user type, and why was he disappointed?

It is very unlikely that a user will type such a string on Google, and when searching for "Docusaurus 2"

I'm just trying to understand better your motivations to figure out the best way to do something about it.

Maybe by default we could write "your site www.xyz.com did not load properly" or something?

Does a new config option really solve the problem? As many site owners wouldn't even be aware of that option?

[Morriz]

Look, I really don't care what REAL people see that have javascript turned off (I regard them as weirdos and not part of our target population), so I'd rather cater to the CRAWLERS, and get a nice message on google et al.

[Morriz]

I found our site to be indexed with that message, so it's not about how and via what route I found out about that. Only then did I do an extra search for that string, to reveal the scale of this.

[Morriz]

I have to say I am not aware anymore of what I searched for, but it was the day of a media announcement and was generating some keyword combos and then saw it indexed like that. I just tried some again but can't reproduce.

[slorber]

I understand.
Will try to find a solution, not sure I can totally prevent it to be indexed but at least it should be possible to disable/customize it.

[Morriz]

Thanks for being so sweet. Sorry about my hammering. It's no prio.

[slorber]

Hey,

Totally forgot about this, but it's already possible to disable this message 😅

https://v2.docusaurus.io/docs/next/docusaurus.config.js/#baseurlissuebanner

Still trying to find a solution, will attempt a few things to make the message not indexed by default, but not sure about the Google Crawler behavior :