Re: Adding links to alternate versions of doc pages

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 12:58, Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 29, 2012, at 10:07 AM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> 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.

What we were told earlier was "just add a sitemap with relative
weights and that should fix it". Well, we now have a sitemap with
relative weights, and it has made pretty much no effect at all (but a
fair amount of work was unfortunately spent in building it :S)

We can use it to *remove* the older versions so it only hits on
current, but that's not really what we want.


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

We could make that for the root docs link, but is it generally smart
enough to realize that any sublinks in those docs are *also* the
canonical versions? I doubt it, but I don't know enough about
google...


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

Ah, you mean basically a link on every page going back to /current/?

That does bring back the whole problem of filenames/URLs being
different between different versions of course..


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

Exactly.


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

I have, and not found anything interesting. But I'm happy to admit I
don't really know what I'd be looking for :-)


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 Magnus Hagander
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