Re: an attempt to fix the Google search problem

> On 10 Nov 2016, at 20:51, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 7:32 PM, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu <mailto:stark(at)mit(dot)edu>> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 4:34 PM, Peter Eisentraut
> <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com <mailto:peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>> wrote:
> > I believe I have a promising fix for that. By adding a <link
> > rel="canonical"> to the documentation pages that point to the "current"
> > version, search engines will be encouraged to return the current version
> > search results.
>
> I don't think this "encourages" them to return the current version. I
> believe it teaches them that they should only ever return the current
> version and the old versions are just copies of it that should never
> be returned.
>
> We could perhaps adopt that attitude altogether though. Treat all the
> versions as the same page with a selector at the top between the
> versions. When you land on a page if you don't pass an explicit
> version as a parameter always assume the current version. Unless
> people start linking to specific versions in which case the problem
> starts all over.
>
> That matches my experience with other sites. The page with the canonical ref is basically removed from the search engine, and any hits from it will go to the other page.
>
> Since we do have the links to previous versions at the top of the page, so perhaps that's what we actually want?

If we want to Google searches to always reach the current version unless a
version is explicitly searched, instrumenting the links to the older versions
with nofollow while keeping them in the sitemap.xml should work. It does mean
that we kill the accumulated PageRank on the older pages though (which either
of these schemes do AFAICT).

cheers ./daniel