Re: SEO for documentation

On 26 Sep 2015 05:45, "Amir Rohan" <amir(dot)rohan(at)mail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> It seems a small thing, but in the last few days I've been spending
> lost of time with the docs and this inconsistency can become annoying
> quite quickly.
> I think google gives webmasters some control over the navigation
> to their site, by cooperating with their crawler. Perhaps
> a sitemap could change things for the better. Just a guess,
> SEO is not my field.
>
> 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.

I looked into this when I was working at Google. There have been some
improvements in the area but it's still not satisfactory in my opinion. And
its not just us, the same problem is endemic in Java documentation and a
lot of similar projects.

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.