Re: Adding links to alternate versions of doc pages

On Mar 29, 2012, at 10:07 AM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> On ons, 2012-03-28 at 21:14 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> You can add the dropdown fairly easily in the website code. However,
>> that assumes that no pages have *changed filenames* between versions.
>> Which is not true. That would either drop those versions from the
>> list, or generate a 404. I'm not sure how to create some sort of
>> mapping between versions that would actually work without being
>> actively maintained (and if it has to be actively maintained, it will
>> go out of date).
>
> Not that those cross-version links wouldn't be useful (in fact, I often
> would like to have them when starting at the latest version going
> backwards),

Yup. I often end up editing the URL to compare the same page
across several versions. Links would be nice.

> but they don't really solve the underlying problem.  I don't
> really believe that it is a general search engine behavior to always
> prefer the oldest resource among alternatives.  For example, if I search
> for something like "presidential elections", I surely don't get links to
> the oldest presidential election on record.

For a random search ("postgresql current_timestamp") I'm getting
versions 8.1 and 8.0 on Google, version 8.1 on Bing. No mention of
current or anything newer than 8.1 on the first page of either.

>
> A related problem: At least a search on Google will usually find the
> documentation of some old version.  A search on Bing, however, doesn't
> find the documentation at all.  That indicates to me that there is
> something seriously wrong in how the web site is constructed.

rel="canonical" is one way to tell search engines to look at one
particular page as the canonical version.

Having all the specific-version pages use that to point to the
non-version URL might help.

The existing priority stuff in the sitemap should help with this,
but it doesn't seem to.

I'm assuming someone has checked the google webmaster
tools reports for the site, to see if there's anything interesting
there.

Cheers,
  Steve