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

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:
> >
> > Greetings,
> >
> > * Jonathan S. Katz (jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org) wrote:
> >>> On 10/19/18 6:26 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> >>> For reasons I can't quite understand the /static/ in the docs URL bugs
> >>> me, now that we don't have /interactive/ anymore. Could we just shorten
> >>> that out of the URL? The redirects shouldn't be problematic...
> >>
> >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
> >
> > I tend to agree.
> >
> >>> I think as long as we issue the right redirects, search engines
> >>> shouldn't be troubled by this, but my knowledge about this kind of stuff
> >>> is severely outdated.
> >>
> >> We would need permanent redirects, but those are not hard to set up,
> >> especially in Django (or at the webserver level if we wanted to be super
> >> efficient).
> >
> > Sure, could be done either way.
> >
> >> AFAIK this should be fairly trivial (and a good idea to do) so I'd +1
> >> the change. I think, again, it's a matter if we want to apply it at the
> >> Django or webserver level.
> >
> > 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/?

Greetings,

Andres Freund