Craig James schrieb:
The problem is that Google ranks pages based on inbound links, so
older versions of Postgres *always* come up before the latest version
in page ranking.
Since 2009 you can deal with this by defining the canonical-version.
(http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html)
This is a really cool feature, but it's not what we need. The
"canonical" refers to the URL, not the web page. It's only supposed to
be used if you have multiple URLs that are actually the *same* page; the
"canonical" URL tells Google "use only this URL for this page."
But in our case, the Postgres manuals for each release have different
URLs *and* different content, so the "canonical URL" isn't the right
solution.
This is true, but the content is allowed to change "a little". Of course
their is no percentage of allowed changes. But it can be quite much.
I've used this feature for some clients, which push their content into
very different websites and it does work.
Most of the content of the documentation doesn't change much between the
releases. In most cases the canonical will work the way i suggest.
In case of big changes even the recommandation of using a "current"
version won't work. Its true that Google ranks pages based on inbound
links. But there are more than 200 other factores, which influence the
rankings. Most people do not know, that changing most of a sites content
makes the inbound links for a long time useless. After big changes in
the documentation the "current" entry will be droped for some monthes
and the old entries will appear. But note, that every single site of the
documentation is ranked for itself. From my experience i would expect
the canonical-version with better results, than the current-version.
But the canonical is not the best solution in my opinion. I often edit
the urls of some documentations, because i need it for a special
postgresql version. The documentation clearly misses a version-switch.
Combined with an big note, that the current displayed documentation is
not the one of the current postgresql-version, this will be the best
compromiss in my opinion.
Greetings from Germany,
Torsten
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