On 09/26/2015 02:00 PM, Greg Stark wrote:
>
> On 26 Sep 2015 05:45, "Amir Rohan" <amir.rohan@mail.com
> <mailto:amir.rohan@mail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> So, can something be done about this? If the website is instrumented
>> for it, can you check how many landings on /docs immediately navigate
>> to another version? that would give sime idea of how common this
>> pain is.
>
> <...>
> My only suggestion is perhaps we should have a whole separate domain for
> the current version documentation and treat that as the canonical URL
> and try to get everyone to link there. Then separately have a domain for
> old documentation but include headers on the pages urging people to link
> to the other site.
>
> No amount of fiddling with the site map or page tags will help though.
> Those things can help Google find the right pages but here the problem
> is that Google knows about both pages and thinks the older one is more
> relevant to your search.
>
I'm not sure a new domain is necessary.
- Google rankings are supposed to reflect user preference
- They gauge user preference by inspecting the links people post
in various places.
- The site's link structure overwhelmingly shapes the links
people post.
So what the web team needs to do is to have people end up
with "/docs/current" links in their address bar and "copy link"
results as often as possible. The site isn't currently designed
to do that. At all.
If you:
1) Replace the navbar current version link to always point at
"/docs/current" (available now, but not used on the website)
2) Add a redirect rule to the server so that people accessing direct
links to the current version are redirected to "/docs/current"
You'll get people linking to "/docs/current" far more often.
Asking users to change their behavior won't work nearly as well
as adjusting the systems and defaults they naturally go along with.
Once people are consistently linking to "/docs/current", google's
algo is bound to detect this over time. As a bonus, that path will
dominate other versions over time, unlike now where every new version
causes fresh links to be posted that compete with older ones.
The signal strength for "/docs/current" will come to swamp out the
others, if you will, because it reflects "all versions (from now on)"
and not just a particular one.
Of course who knows how google's makes its sausage, but common sense
tells me that this should work much better, by giving google algo
what what it's looking for, and helping it do what it is trying to do.
Amir