Re: Search points to ancient manuals

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au> wrote:

> On 11/01/2012 07:35 PM, Marti Raudsepp wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au>
> wrote:> I suspect most of our
> > referrers link to versioned docs, which boosts their rank, and the
> > search engine has no way of telling that the individual versions are
> > mostly equivalent.
>
> I'd say so, yes. That's partly because when you visit the docs site, you
> have to pick a version. You have to edit the URL to get /current .
>

*That* is something we could certainly fix. We could add a "current" link
to all documentation pages. To the left of "9.2" (or whatever happens to be
the latst).

That'll also seed the site with lots of links to the /current/ version. I'm
not sure if that actually helps the search engines, though.

> We might detect search engines by their User-Agent header and always
> > serve them redirects to /current/ (if the page exists in current) or
> > the latest version. But that would have the effect of de-indexing old
> > versions of pages that have been revised -- which isn't an issue most
> > of the time, but is not ideal either.
>
> Yep; in particular, that's bad when the old versions have significantly
> different info, as with `custom_variable_classes`, which is gone in 9.2,
> or the `shared_buffers` changes for 9.3.
>
> Maybe if the user visits old docs there just needs to be a banner with a
> prominent "This documentation is specific to version xx of PostgreSQL;
> if this is not the version you are using please choose yours from the
> links above."

How intrusive do we want to make that? I think just having the links up
there has actually made it a lot more user friendly in that regard
already...

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/