Re: Get rid of /static/ in doc urls?

On 10/22/18 7:00 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2018-10-20 15:03:40 -0400, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
>>
>>> On Oct 19, 2018, at 8:32 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
>>> The one thing I wonder about is- didn't someone say at one point that
>>> shorter urls are preferred by search engines, and if we made the
>>> 'current' doc link shorter than the per-version doc links that it'd be
>>> much more likely to show up higher in search results (which we would
>>> generally prefer)..?
>>>
>>> Presuming that is the case, maybe we get rid of /static/ but add
>>> something in for the per-version urls to make them longer than
>>> 'current'?
>>>
>>> Or, if that's all wrong, that's fine too. :)
>>
>> In some odd-list discussions, we’ve discussed reaching out to some other OSS communities
>> to see how they handle multiple versions of documentation wrt search engines. I’d rather
>> we follow through on that part first instead of
>> continually guessing what will make sense.
>>
>> FWIW (and ignoring my own advice) a lot of SEO is done on URLs with the “slug” names, so I
>> don’t think too much weight is placed in length until it’s over a “large” amount. Additionally,
>> the content earlier in the URL is more important anyway, so just having less should be more.
>
> Isn't the "multiple versions vs search engines" discussion relatively
> independent from removing /static/?
>

Not from an SEO standpoint, which is what Stephen had brought up above.
It's all interrelated.

However, I think we can move on the removing `/static/` more quickly, we
just need to pick a method. I could at least put together a pgweb patch
to show what it would look like from that approach.

Jonathan