Re: SEO for documentation

<p dir="ltr"><br /> On 26 Sep 2015 05:45, "Amir Rohan" <<a
href="mailto:amir.rohan@mail.com">amir.rohan@mail.com</a>>wrote:<br /> ><br /> > It seems a small thing, but
inthe last few days I've been spending<br /> > lost of time with the docs and this inconsistency can become
annoying<br/> > quite quickly.<br /> > I think google gives webmasters some control over the navigation<br />
>to their site, by cooperating with their crawler. Perhaps<br /> > a sitemap could change things for the better.
Justa guess,<br /> > SEO is not my field.<br /> ><br /> > So, can something be done about this? If the website
isinstrumented<br /> > for it, can you check how many landings on /docs immediately navigate<br /> > to another
version?that would give sime idea of how common this<br /> > pain is.<p dir="ltr">I looked into this when I was
workingat Google. There have been some improvements in the area but it's still not satisfactory in my opinion. And its
notjust us, the same problem is endemic in Java documentation and a lot of similar projects.<p dir="ltr">My only
suggestionis perhaps we should have a whole separate domain for the current version documentation and treat that as the
canonicalURL and try to get everyone to link there. Then separately have a domain for old documentation but include
headerson the pages urging people to link to the other site.<p dir="ltr">No amount of fiddling with the site map or
pagetags will help though. Those things can help Google find the right pages but here the problem is that Google knows
aboutboth pages and thinks the older one is more relevant to your search.