Tell HN: City Codes for up to 4500 municipalities are missing from Google index
2 by rory096 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
(Screenshots available here: https://twitter.com/rory096/status/1016698979504050177) Yesterday I was looking for the specifics on a particular facet of Charlottesville law when I realized that all of the results were discussions about the code or short snippets of ordinances, and none were the City Code itself. Eventually (after more time than I care to admit) I went to the city's website and found it via the nested nav bar (plus about 8 redirects) hosted with a publisher called Municode. Turns out almost none of Charlottesville's City Code — or any other Municode city's — is indexed by Google. The Code has 34 chapters, from libraries to noise control. Chapter 22 (Procurement) is indexed. Chapter 34 (Zoning), Article IX, Division 9 is indexed. That's it. Half of one chapter, 1/65 of another. Codes for Boulder, CO and Irvine, CA are similarly absent from Google results. Oklahoma City has one mirror of their code circa 2010. This issue is likely to affect any of the 4500 municipalities that use Municode and don't have another mirror (which few seem to). I don't think Municode is doing this on purpose — they don't have a robots.txt and a handful of pages are indexed. I suspect it's a combination of the lack of prominence (and convoluted non-301 redirect chains) in links to the codes on city websites and the blank site template that gets filled browser-side with Angular. Given their SaaS model, I don't think they have anything to gain by failing to show up in search results. I recognize that this is the sort of SEO issue that generally falls on the website creator, but given the importance of the content — and the serious impediment to civic literacy when the law is missing from the web — I think it would behoove Google to address the issue themselves. Can HN users help get this into the right hands?
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