feat(seo): experiment C, unique value template on 10 Skills by harlan-zw · Pull Request #318 · skilld-dev/skilld.dev

harlan-zw · 2026-09-30T04:38:39Z

Stacked on #317. Merge #317 first, then retarget this pull request to main.

❓ Type of change

✨ New feature

📚 Description

Google holds the curated Skill URLs as "Discovered, currently not indexed", and about 72% of a Skill page's text is the GitHub SKILL.md word for word. This is experiment C from the SEO death-zone note: do pages that carry data GitHub lacks get crawled sooner than unchanged pages?

Ten treatment pages swap the full SKILL.md body for an excerpt plus facts skilld already holds: run command with the install command beneath it as the opt-in, file inventory, star trend, update pace, related Skills, and compatibility or collection data when it exists. Ten star-matched control pages stay as they are. Every visitor gets the same page. No new prose, no AI text.

Both groups come from the union of the week, month, and all-time trending lists, in the production skills sitemap. The gate and both lists sit in skill-unique-value-experiment.ts, dated, with the 2026-11-11 end date and the cull path. Delete that file and the template to end it.

Treatment: obra/superpowers/writing-plans, imbad0202/academic-research-skills/academic-pipeline, emilkowalski/skills/emil-design-eng, vercel-labs/agent-skills/react-best-practices, ibelick/ui-skills/create-design-md, remotion-dev/skills/remotion-best-practices, dimillian/skills/bug-hunt-swarm, ferdinandobons/startup-skill/startup-pitch, neondatabase/agent-skills/neon-postgres, clerk/skills/clerk-orgs.

Control: mattpocock/skills/ask-matt, coreyhaines31/marketingskills/ai-seo, kepano/obsidian-skills/knap, othmanadi/planning-with-files/planning-with-files, microsoft/playwright-cli/playwright-cli, antfu/skills/nitro, addyosmani/web-quality-skills/accessibility, getsentry/skills/prompt-optimizer, browser-use/plugins/browser-use, prisma/skills/prisma-database-setup.

Open points:

Only 22 trending Skills had a three-segment canonical page in the sitemap, so the groups are paired by repository stars, not drawn at random.

🤖 AI disclosure: Harlan Agent Kit modified this description. My AI open-source policy.

Any made-up /gh/<owner>/<repo>/<skill> URL answered 200 with a thin page and a canonical to the homepage. Google filed 2,621 of them as soft 404s, and the open URL space wastes a small crawl budget. A missing Skill now answers 404 with noindex and no canonical. A page with no Skill never canonicalises to the homepage.

Experiment C tests whether Skill pages that carry data GitHub lacks get crawled sooner. One constant holds both groups and the cull path.

Treatment pages swap the full SKILL.md body for facts, an excerpt, and related Skills, all from data skilld already holds. Controls stay as is.

harlan-zw · 2026-09-30T04:38:45Z

Treatment page on the local dev server: obra/superpowers/writing-plans.

The excerpt showed a heading and no body, and repeated the description already in the page header. It now keeps whole blocks up to about 250 words.

harlan-zw · 2026-09-30T04:41:20Z

Excerpt now keeps the first section's body (plus the second when the first is short), about 250 words, cut at block boundaries. Recaptured treatment page.

harlan-github-agent · 2026-09-30T04:45:19Z

🤖 BLOCKED

Harlan Agent Kit posted this automated review. It is not Harlan's personal review or approval. AI open source policy. A person still decides the merge.

Merge gate: BLOCKED. The pull request has merge conflicts.
Review gate: Passed. No finding above 80/100.
CI gate: Passed.
Logged (30/100): The excerpt trimmer can cut inside an HTML attribute or comment and emit a dangling attribute that breaks the rendered excerpt and can hide following content. View code Optional follow-up.
- Ask an agent to verify and fix this finding
Logged (25/100): Two of the ten pairs lost their star matching in the head commit, so the star-matched pairing claim no longer holds for pairs 7 and 8. View code Optional follow-up.
- Ask an agent to verify and fix this finding
Logged (25/100): The declared end date is documentary only; the experiment does not expire on 2026-11-11. View code Optional follow-up.
- Ask an agent to verify and fix this finding
Logged (20/100): Treatment pages can show an 'Excerpt from SKILL.md' heading above an empty bordered box. View code Optional follow-up.
- Ask an agent to verify and fix this finding
Logged (20/100): File counts come from a truncated 250-file subset while the displayed total is the full count, with no truncation hint. View code Optional follow-up.
- Ask an agent to verify and fix this finding
Logged (15/100): The PR's screenshot evidence is inaccessible, so the rendered treatment-page layout is unverified. View code Optional follow-up.
- Ask an agent to verify and fix this finding
Logged (15/100): The updated-time binding lacks the data-allow-mismatch guard the same pattern uses elsewhere, risking hydration mismatch warnings. View code Optional follow-up.
- Ask an agent to verify and fix this finding

Selected findings run after merge and open separate pull requests.

VISION says every Skill surface leads with the run command. The reason text that pushed install for Skills with code is gone.

harlan-zw · 2026-09-30T05:41:20Z

🤖 READY · 95/100

Harlan Agent Kit posted this automated review. It is not Harlan's personal review or approval. AI open source policy. Human merge decision still required.

Logged (30/100): layers/registry/app/utils/skill-unique-value.ts:147 cuts a long paragraph at any . inside the tag text. A period inside an alt or title attribute can leave a dangling <img alt="... in the excerpt.
Logged (25/100): layers/registry/app/utils/skill-unique-value-experiment.ts:34 endsOn is never read, so the gate does not expire on 2026-11-11. Delete the file to end the experiment.
Logged (20/100): layers/registry/app/components/_SkillUniqueValue.vue:213 A treatment Skill with no contentHtml renders the excerpt heading over an empty bordered box.

`nuxi preview --port 5678` starts wrangler on 8787 for the Cloudflare preset, so Playwright timed out waiting for 5678. The Worker also read an empty D1 under .output, so every Skill API call failed with 500 and a missing Skill page rendered its error state with status 200. The script now applies local migrations and runs wrangler dev against the same local D1 that `pnpm dev` uses. A fresh checkout gets a migrated, empty D1.

The page sets no canonical for a missing Skill, but nuxt-seo-utils adds a self canonical to every page that is not a Nuxt error. That is harmless on a 404. The spec now fails only when a canonical names another URL, which is the homepage bug the PR fixes.

A transient API error rendered a real Skill page as 200 noindex, which could drop it from Google. The failed state now answers 503 with Retry-After and emits no robots directive, so Google retries.

…nique-value

Neither Skill sat on a trending board after #322, so both went noindex,follow and no longer matched their indexable partners.

harlan-github-agent

Harlan Agent Kit posted this automated review. AI open source policy.

Automated Review: BLOCKED.

Read the Review results

harlan-zw added 3 commits September 30, 2026 14:17

feat(seo): add the unique value experiment gate and data shaping

7a6d033

Experiment C tests whether Skill pages that carry data GitHub lacks get crawled sooner. One constant holds both groups and the cull path.

feat(seo): show the unique value template on treatment Skill pages

59620b4

Treatment pages swap the full SKILL.md body for facts, an excerpt, and related Skills, all from data skilld already holds. Controls stay as is.

fix(seo): cut a fuller SKILL.md excerpt for treatment pages

7abea95

The excerpt showed a heading and no body, and repeated the description already in the page header. It now keeps whole blocks up to about 250 words.

harlan-zw added this pull request to stack #319 September 30, 2026 04:43

harlan-github-agent Bot added the harlan-agent-running An Agent holds a Task on this issue or pull request right now. label Sep 30, 2026

feat(seo): lead treatment pages with run, install as the opt-in

1ad515d

VISION says every Skill surface leads with the run command. The reason text that pushed install for Skills with code is gone.

harlan-github-agent Bot added harlan-agent-running An Agent holds a Task on this issue or pull request right now. and removed harlan-agent-ready The automated Review passed every gate on this head commit. labels Sep 30, 2026

harlan-zw added harlan-agent-ready The automated Review passed every gate on this head commit. and removed harlan-agent-running An Agent holds a Task on this issue or pull request right now. labels Sep 30, 2026

harlan-zw added 4 commits September 30, 2026 16:03

fix(registry): answer 503 with Retry-After when the Skill API fails

544034d

A transient API error rendered a real Skill page as 200 noindex, which could drop it from Google. The failed state now answers 503 with Retry-After and emits no robots directive, so Google retries.

merge: bring in fix/soft-404-missing-skills

7aedd51

harlan-zw removed this pull request from stack #319 September 30, 2026 09:09

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into feat/seo-experiment-u…

7dafaa3

…nique-value

harlan-zw changed the base branch from fix/soft-404-missing-skills to main September 30, 2026 10:29

fix(seo): swap two noindexed Skills in experiment C

c52a0d3

Neither Skill sat on a trending board after #322, so both went noindex,follow and no longer matched their indexable partners.

harlan-github-agent Bot added the harlan-agent-running An Agent holds a Task on this issue or pull request right now. label Sep 30, 2026

harlan-github-agent Bot reviewed Oct 2, 2026

View reviewed changes

This was referenced Oct 8, 2026

[ACTION NEEDED] Daily check-in: 2026-10-08 #585

Closed

ci-review: run log for skilld-dev/skilld.dev #563

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feat(seo): experiment C, unique value template on 10 Skills - #318

feat(seo): experiment C, unique value template on 10 Skills#318
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🤖 READY · 95/100

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