On 11/01/2012 07:35 PM, Marti Raudsepp wrote: > On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc@ringerc.id.au> wrote:> I suspect most of our
> referrers link to versioned docs, which boosts their rank, and the > search engine has no way of telling that the individual versions are > mostly equivalent.
I'd say so, yes. That's partly because when you visit the docs site, you have to pick a version. You have to edit the URL to get /current .
*That* is something we could certainly fix. We could add a "current" link to all documentation pages. To the left of "9.2" (or whatever happens to be the latst).
That'll also seed the site with lots of links to the /current/ version. I'm not sure if that actually helps the search engines, though.
> We might detect search engines by their User-Agent header and always > serve them redirects to /current/ (if the page exists in current) or > the latest version. But that would have the effect of de-indexing old > versions of pages that have been revised -- which isn't an issue most > of the time, but is not ideal either.
Yep; in particular, that's bad when the old versions have significantly different info, as with `custom_variable_classes`, which is gone in 9.2, or the `shared_buffers` changes for 9.3.
Maybe if the user visits old docs there just needs to be a banner with a prominent "This documentation is specific to version xx of PostgreSQL; if this is not the version you are using please choose yours from the links above."
How intrusive do we want to make that? I think just having the links up there has actually made it a lot more user friendly in that regard already...
