Re: [DOCS] suggestion about SEO on www.postgresql.org/docs

On 10/07/2014 06:46 PM, Marti Raudsepp wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 6:00 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
>> Are we using the rel="canonical" suggestion in our web docs now?
> 
> Apparently not. I looked into this and I'm not 100% certain we should
> do it. But if we decide so, I'm willing to code up a patch.
> 
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596 states:
> ==== 8< ====
>   The target (canonical) IRI MUST identify content that is either
>    duplicative or a superset of the content at the context (referring)
>    IRI.  Authors who declare the canonical link relation ought to
>    anticipate that applications such as search engines can:
> 
>    o  Index content only from the target IRI (i.e., content from the
>       context IRIs will be likely disregarded as duplicative).
> 
>    o  Consolidate IRI properties, such as link popularity, to the target
>       IRI.
> 
>    o  Display the target IRI as the representative IRI.
> ==== 8< ====
> 
> We certainly want property 2, but property 1 suggests that older
> versions of docs are dropped from search engines altogether. It's not
> clear whether they are that strict in reality -- does anyone know?
> 
> This would not be a problem if we also retained notes about earlier
> supported versions in the current version, which would make our latest
> version a "superset" of earlier
> ones.
> 
> But I believe we very rarely remove material from docs, so I believe
> the upsides outweigh the cons.

I'm not sure how search engines really behave here - dont we have any
SEO experts on the list who can shed some light on this?

> 
> ----
> Another question is whether we should make "interactive" point to
> "static" -- again, actually the interactive one is the superset, since
> static doesn't include user comments. But do we care about search
> engines indexing comments anyway? They're not present in sitemap.xml
> either and I've never landed on the interactive version when coming from Google.
> 
> My proposal:
> 1. Doc pages that are *older* than current, and exist in the current
> version have canonical URL /docs/current/static/pagename.html
> 2. If it doesn't exist in current, we link to the last version that
> includes this page, like /docs/8.4/static/install-win32.html
> 3. Newer versions (devel/beta) should perhaps point to itself and not
> /current/? This would make new features googleable for testers. The
> doc links use rel=nofollow when linking to them, so they're already
> ranked lower by search engines.
> 
> It appears there are already lots of places that hardcode the
> http://www.postgresql.org/ URL, so it makes sense to use absolute URLs
> for canonical too?

I would actually strongly prefer to _NOT_ use even more absolute URLs on
the website for multiple reasons, one is that it will make moving the
website to https-only more difficult and the other one is that it makes
playing with your own copy of it (running under a different url) a pain.
I actually did a round of cleanups the other day (mostly on the
presskit) to remove some of the hardcoded urls.

Stefan