Re: Search points to ancient manuals

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.

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"?

Josh