Re: Search points to ancient manuals - Mailing list pgsql-www

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Marti Raudsepp <marti@juffo.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc@ringerc.id.au> wrote:
>> I've often wished that the docs would redirect to the /current/interactive version when the referer is google. Not enough to write the code yet, though.
>
> That solution is backwards. You click on the Google link that says
> "Documentation: 8.1: EXPLAIN", but when you click on it, you magically
> end up in PostgreSQL 9.2 docs.

You can actually get the search string from the referrer header and
see if 8.1 is in it I suppose. But that's still not very good. The
user might have seen multiple versions in their search results and
chosen a specific version they wanted. Being redirected to a page
different from what the search engine saw and showed the snippet is a
bad idea.

> Instead we should encourage or force Googlebot (and other search
> engines) to index/prefer the current version of docs. I hear the
> sitemaps file already gives higher priority to current, but clearly
> that's not having the effect it should. I suspect most of our

The documentation on sitemap.org isn't very clear on what this priority does:

>> The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not
>> affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages
>> you deem most important for the crawlers.
>>
>> The default priority of a page is 0.5.
>>
>> Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search
>> engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site,
>> so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.
>>
>> Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the
>> priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.

There are multiple suggestions here about what the priority might
mean. Of course it's up to the individual search engines how they use
this information.

Keep in mind that Google might have an opinion about which results are
most relevant to the user. When 9.2 is released it might be the case
that most uses are actually still looking for 9.1. It may even be the
case that most users today are currently looking for 8.4 or 9.0 due to
some popular distribution shipping it.