| From: | adam sah <adam(dot)sah(at)gmail(dot)com> |
|---|---|
| To: | "Jonathan S(dot) Katz" <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> |
| Cc: | pgsql-www(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org |
| Subject: | Re: patch to point search engines at current version of docs |
| Date: | 2019-05-12 04:19:59 |
| Message-ID: | CALWCfd+nj=4j=hWdd_EgFhTX=8ZgEbUWZrQCnJU5h-N-xFMMCw@mail.gmail.com |
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| Thread: | |
| Lists: | pgsql-www |
Yeah, sigh, good point - I've confirmed that rel=canonical will make it
impossible to find old versions in Google, even (e.g.) adding the version
number to your search keywords. As an example, Citus uses readthedocs with
rel=canonical and old docs versions require clicks from the new version
page http://docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/canonical.html
Let's see if we can support both types of users. Some ideas:
1. nudge search engines to rank the current version higher - a lot of
subtle work:
https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday
2. NOT RECOMMENDED: let users pick a default version, then detect visits
from search engines and set/read a cookie and then redirect to this
version. Google doesn't like this and will likely punish the site for the
perceived deception.
3. use a browser extension to do this trick - this should be safe from
penalties. It will require users to use particular browsers (Firefox or
Chrome) and perform a one-time installation.
4. (yuck) offer a keyboard shortcut to a (user selected?) old version ?
5. other ideas?
adam
On Sat, May 11, 2019, 10:41 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org>
wrote:
> Hi Adam,
>
> On 5/11/19 5:58 PM, adam sah wrote:
> > Currently, search engines often rank old versions of Postgres
> > documentation pages higher than newer versions. This patch should fix
> > this by having search engines always prefer the current version of the
> > documentation. Users who want old versions can click on the links at the
> > top of the page - today, users who want the current version have to do
> this.
> >
> > original
> > discussion:
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CANNMO%2B%2BkxJmaaB7X6hq_8SqcEruySZrF%3DUkcPm-EG1JCKVascw%40mail.gmail.com
> >
> > more about rel=canonical:
> https://www.google.com/search?q=rel+canonical+url
>
> Thanks for the suggestion! I remember looking at this with Magnus last
> year during the last time this was brought up. I found this page to be
> very helpful on the subject:
>
> https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
>
> We also researched what some other open source projects were doing with
> respect to their documentation pages to see how they could optimize it.
>
> I believe the strategy you are proposing would involve setting every
> anchor tag that is pointing to "/docs/current/.*" to contain the
> rel="canonical" attribute. If we went down this path, the better way
> would be to use the "<link rel="canonical" ...>" method that is
> mentioned, i.e.
>
> <link
> rel="canonical"
> href="https://www.postgresq.org/docs/current/the-doc-page.html"
> />
>
> and put it in the <head> block.
>
> At the time, one drawback we found was that this could end up causing
> pages that existed in older, but supported, versions to go missing from
> search engines, which is not necessarily great. We may end up deciding
> that this doesn't matter, and that the main point is to get people to
> the documentation and then they can select the version, but OTOH, this
> could end up breaking a lot of people's workflows for how they look for
> info in the docs (myself included).
>
> We might be able to incorporate rel="alternate" on the other
> documentation version pages to let the crawlers know that alternate
> versions exist, but from what I've seen it seems to be restricted to
> i18n or media support, and does not seem to take other attributes such
> as "versions."
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jonathan
>
>
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