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 If we want to keep outdated version away from the search results they need a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.
Robert Treat
https://xzilla.net
