Martijn Visser created KAFKA-20265:
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Summary: Add canonical URL tags to Kafka Javadoc pages to point
search engines to suggest latest stable version
Key: KAFKA-20265
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-20265
Project: Kafka
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: documentation
Reporter: Martijn Visser
Currently, Kafka's Javadoc pages lack canonical URL tags, which causes search
engines to index Javadoc for older Kafka versions. Users searching for Kafka
APIs (e.g., "kafka producer api value serializer") are often directed to
outdated documentation such as the Kafka 2.4 Javadoc, rather than the latest
stable release.
Without canonical tags, search engines treat each version's Javadoc as an
independent authoritative source. This means users frequently land on old,
potentially misleading API documentation as their starting point.
Proposed fix:
Add
{code:html}
<link rel="canonical" href="...">
{code}
tags to the Javadoc generation pipeline, pointing each versioned page to its
equivalent on the latest stable release. This ensures search engines
consolidate ranking signals to the current documentation.
This change was recently made for the Flink Javadoc (see
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-38955). After adding canonical
tags, search engines now consistently surfaces the stable Flink Javadoc as the
top result for Flink API searches, regardless of which version's URL is
crawled. The Flink change can be referenced as a concrete example of the
approach and its impact.
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