Re: Search points to ancient manuals

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 7:28 AM, Josh Kupershmidt <schmiddy(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au> wrote:
>>> 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...
>
> IMO the "This page in other versions" links work pretty well as-is for
> supported versions. I wouldn't mind seeing a small warning when
> viewing an unsupported version page, though. It's a little too easy to
> follow a search result or other link and land on a 7.x doc page
> without noticing.

Not an unreasonable thing to do. Looking forward to a patch from
someone who can figure out how to make one that's just intrusive
enough without being too intrusive :)

> I'm not sure about the thornier problem of Google continuing to rank
> the ancient pages higher than the new ones in many cases. I've seen a
> few cases in our own wiki of links going to specific (old) versions of
> doc pages, when they really should have pointed to /current, which is
> easy enough to fix.
>
> Here's a crazy idea: what about marking links to the unsupported
> versions with rel="nofollow"?

I don't think that's really that crazy :) And it's also easy to do, so
I've done it. It'll take a while before it actually hits the site
though, as it takes a while to work it's way through all the different
cached docs pages.

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