Canonical url for latest document set?

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 11:04 PM, Conor McNally <theconor@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

There was a suggestion a few years ago on this forum about adding a
canonical url to the documentation set:
/messages/by-id/04E4F5A6-6526-4DDC-
A9E5-2991E3B2ED83%40cantoute.com

Was there a reason for not doing this? At the moment it can be pretty
annoying googling something like "postgres select syntax", and getting a
pretty random selection of duplicate pages, none of which matches the
current version of Postgres. Even google for "postgres 9.6 select syntax"
still doesn't return the correct version for me.

Yes, and the reason being that the docs aren't actually duplicates.

Something like "postgres 9.6 select syntax" *should* work. But more
importantly, if we make it the canonical URL, then it will be impossible to
search for old versions at all, will it not?

In contrast, other documentation sites such as MySql, CouchDb, Python,

Django, etc. all behave much better in search engine results. For CouchDb
and Django you can see use of the canonical tag on the documentation
pages. For the others they must be doing something different, but still
they've managed to direct Google to the single, current version of the
correct page.

Yeah, I'm a frequent user of the django docs at least, and it's absolutely
horrible. Since I'm not using the very latest version, then *every* time I
search for docs I get sent to the wrong version. So I've got basically 100%
failure rate with the django docs, vs maybe a 50-60% failure rate with the
postgres docs.

I'm just wondering if something has looked into this already, or if
canonical url is something that could be tested for the postgres
documentation?

The problem with testing it is that I assume its' destructive testing. Once
we've tested it, it's very hard to go back.

Here is some information from google:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

The goal for me would be to make the documentation for the current version
of Postgres rise to the top of search engine results, and to remove the
random results for older versions.

What do you think?

If we can find an actual statement from somebody who *knows* (and nto just
speculates like most of us do) how it works.. In particular, will a search
for older versions still work or will that force *everybody* to the current
version?

Things do seem to get worse by the day. I guess we're eventually
approaching the point where all version specific queries *already* fail.
We're not there yet, but we seem to be closer than we've ever been before..

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/&gt;
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/&gt;

Hi Magnus,

Agreed - maybe canonical isn't the best way to fix it.

It would be nice in general if:
- "postgres select syntax" could take you to the default current version of
the documentation
- 'postrgres 9.4 select syntax" could take you to the specified alternative
version

This will take an expert on SEO, but from what I see on the MySql website
(which achieves the above):
- Root link into the current documentation set is much more prominent than
the alternate versions
- Page title has <product - version number> as a single phrase
- There is a 302 redirect when following the unversioned link from google
- h1 and h2 tags are not used on their documentation pages

All that is just observation on my part, so I hope there is someone that
can advise more conclusively.

Cheers,

Conor

On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 1:22 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
wrote: