On Sat, Apr 16, 2022 at 5:02 PM Robert Treat <rob@xzilla.net> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 6:21 PM Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se> wrote: > > > On 14 Apr 2022, at 18:23, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote: > > > > On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 1:25 AM Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se> wrote: > >> If we want to keep outdated version away from the search results they need a > >> noindex attribute in <head>: > >> > >> <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> > > > > I see. > > > > Do you think that doing so for out of support releases would improve > > our search results? Do you see any potential downsides? > > I don't really have a good answer, googlebot et.al acts in mysterious ways. It > shouldn't affect searching for up to date information since we identify > /current as the canonical version of pages in backbranches (supported or not). > But if an 8.4 page is indexed and linked to from a gazillion stack overflow > posts, then who knows how that shifts the results. > > Given how it works right now, and what we know, I would err on the side of > caution and keep them indexed - but that's a highly unscientifically based > opinion. >
The immediate use case that comes to mind is folks searching for documentation in older versions that no longer exists in the /current/ documentation, which is perhaps a small use case but also a fairly valid one. I reckon there are others if we think about it, so +1 on leaving the old version indexed for now.
Yeah, losing that ability completely would definitely be a negative. We've already lost (I think) the ability to search for those words if they are on the same page as a new version which doesn't have it, losing the ability to search it off pages that don't even exist anymore seems even worse.
What would be the actual *advantage* of excluding them?
