Following Mark's advice, I wrote and ran a little Perl script that inserted an "outdated" box at the top of all of the old 5.x documentation pages (except the javadocs) and also inserts a <link rel="canonical"...> tag in the <head> so Google (and other search engines) can do a better job of identifying the newer stuff as more important. Hopefully in a few days (weeks? months?) the search engine results will improve.
The script made copies of the original files under ".bak" names in the same directories. We can delete those after a few days or weeks, once we're confident that the new versions are fully acceptable to everybody. Alternatively, we can revert the changes, change the script, and re-run it if needed. I'll guess I'll check the script into svn somewhere once I figure out where it should go. On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 7:10 AM, Bob Harner <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks, Mark, very helpful! > > Bob Harner > > On Jun 1, 2011 9:23 PM, "Mark" <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:33 PM, Bob Harner <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Mark, thanks for the tips! >>> >>>> 2. Specify a canonical url for the old pages. >>> >>> Not following you there. Care to explain? >> >> Lets say you have a website that sells a running shoe called the x115 >> and you can find the same shoe with variations under different paths. >> So you might have: >> >> www.example.com/running_shoes/x115.html >> www.example.com/blue_shoes/x115.html >> www.example.com/red_shoes/x115.html >> www.example.com/trendy_shoes/x115.html >> etc. >> >> When a search engine sees this, there isn't really anyway to figure >> out which page is the canonical page for the x115. To solve this, you >> can specify the canonical url in your <head> like this: >> >> <link rel="canonical" >> href="http://www.example.com/running_shoes/x115.html"; /> >> >> You put that in each page to tell Google that when someone searches >> for x115, you really want them to get the version in the running_shoes >> directory. >> >> So in cases where we have a lot of very similar documentation, it >> could make sense to specify the current version as the canonical >> version. So basically all the prior versions would point to the >> current version. >> >> You might be able to accomplish about the same thing, simply by >> linking all old docs that need to be kept for historical purposes to >> their closes match in the new documentation. Still the canonical is an >> option to consider. It may depend on what is easiest to implement more >> than anything. >> >> Oh and if you do remove content, the most ideal thing would be to >> redirect those pages to the closes equivalent using a 301 redirect. >> That will handle any existing links and it will preserve and redirect >> the page rank to the new pages. >> >> Mark >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] >> For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] >> > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
