Re: Search points to ancient manuals

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc@ringerc.id.au> wrote:
> I've often wished that the docs would redirect to the /current/interactive version when the referer is google. Not
enoughto write the code yet, though.
 

That solution is backwards. You click on the Google link that says
"Documentation: 8.1: EXPLAIN", but when you click on it, you magically
end up in PostgreSQL 9.2 docs.

Instead we should encourage or force Googlebot (and other search
engines) to index/prefer the current version of docs. I hear the
sitemaps file already gives higher priority to current, but clearly
that's not having the effect it should. 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.

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.

Also it would require us to serve docs pages with "Vary: User-Agent",
which would make caching less efficient (but maybe there are
workarounds?)

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Marti