Ready, but still closed

What was decided

On 27 September the 6-in-1 accepted the site as a whole and decided to open all of it to search engines at once. Records a person has not yet reviewed are not hidden from search: the “Sources gathered automatically” badge tells the reader which they are. AI crawlers have no rules of their own. When the rule comes off is not decided. This pass readies everything that has to be in place on that day and leaves Disallow: / in robots.txt.

The sitemap

/sitemap.xml lists every page that may be indexed, more than eighteen hundred addresses in two languages, each with its translation. Only a record has a date of change (lastmod), and it is the record’s own updatedAt. The indexes, the axis and the log have no such date in the data, so the sitemap gives them none: the day of the build would be the date of a change that did not happen. It is the same reason the atlas never puts an article’s date in place of an event’s unknown one.

Languages and structured data

Every page names its translation (hreflang) and the Ukrainian copy as the default. A record shown in another language because its translation is missing is not a translation and names none. The front page tells a search engine what the site is (WebSite); records and indexes say where they stand under the front page (BreadcrumbList). The schema.org Event type is left out on purpose: search engines show it as something still to come, and a record of 1943 is not a listing.

The gate

The sitemap, the canonical link, the noindex rule and the links between languages are four statements about the same page, and any two of them can drift apart without a build error. validate:public now holds them together: every sitemap address is a built page that names itself canonical; every page that may be indexed is in the sitemap; translations name each other; titles and descriptions are not repeated. The check for repeats fired at once: the axis and About had the same description as the front page. Each now has its own.

Alpha

The Alpha release section on About now says three things: a person has accepted the site, most records are not yet accepted (the badge says which), and the site itself is still being checked and worked on. The label under the axis is unchanged.