Subject: suggestion about SEO on www.postgresql.org/docs

From: Antony <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 20:32:21 +0200

May I suggest that on the documentation on the current version (now 9.3) is added a link rel=canonical

Ex:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/

could have 

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/" />

I believe this could help google offering the current documentation as a first choice.
Right now it probably considers it as a duplicated content.

Probably not the right place to tell this, but could’t guess who to send this to.

Sorry for the noise

Antony

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From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 11:00:12 -0400

> Probably not the right place to tell this, but could’t guess who to send this to.

Are we using the rel="canonical" suggestion in our web docs now?

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  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

  + Everyone has their own god. +

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From: Marti Raudsepp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 19:46:52 +0300

> Are we using the rel="canonical" suggestion in our web docs now?

Apparently not. I looked into this and I'm not 100% certain we should
do it. But if we decide so, I'm willing to code up a patch.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596 states:
==== 8< ====
  The target (canonical) IRI MUST identify content that is either
   duplicative or a superset of the content at the context (referring)
   IRI.  Authors who declare the canonical link relation ought to
   anticipate that applications such as search engines can:

   o  Index content only from the target IRI (i.e., content from the
      context IRIs will be likely disregarded as duplicative).

   o  Consolidate IRI properties, such as link popularity, to the target
      IRI.

   o  Display the target IRI as the representative IRI.
==== 8< ====

We certainly want property 2, but property 1 suggests that older
versions of docs are dropped from search engines altogether. It's not
clear whether they are that strict in reality -- does anyone know?

This would not be a problem if we also retained notes about earlier
supported versions in the current version, which would make our latest
version a "superset" of earlier
ones.

But I believe we very rarely remove material from docs, so I believe
the upsides outweigh the cons.

----
Another question is whether we should make "interactive" point to
"static" -- again, actually the interactive one is the superset, since
static doesn't include user comments. But do we care about search
engines indexing comments anyway? They're not present in sitemap.xml
either and I've never landed on the interactive version when coming from Google.

My proposal:
1. Doc pages that are *older* than current, and exist in the current
version have canonical URL /docs/current/static/pagename.html
2. If it doesn't exist in current, we link to the last version that
includes this page, like /docs/8.4/static/install-win32.html
3. Newer versions (devel/beta) should perhaps point to itself and not
/current/? This would make new features googleable for testers. The
doc links use rel=nofollow when linking to them, so they're already
ranked lower by search engines.

It appears there are already lots of places that hardcode the
http://www.postgresql.org/ URL, so it makes sense to use absolute URLs
for canonical too?

Did I miss anything?

Regards,
Marti

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From: Alvaro Herrera <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 14:14:31 -0300

> either and I've never landed on the interactive version when coming from Google.

Please see this thread:
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CABUevEySZgGdTaKJz=[email-masked]

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PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services

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From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2015 12:59:01 -0500

> Probably not the right place to tell this, but could’t guess who to send this to.

Have we made this update to use "canonical" for our web docs?

---

From: Stefan Kaltenbrunner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 16:06:24 +0100

> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6596 states:

I'm not sure how search engines really behave here - dont we have any
SEO experts on the list who can shed some light on this?

> http://www.postgresql.org/ URL, so it makes sense to use absolute URLs

I would actually strongly prefer to _NOT_ use even more absolute URLs on
the website for multiple reasons, one is that it will make moving the
website to https-only more difficult and the other one is that it makes
playing with your own copy of it (running under a different url) a pain.
I actually did a round of cleanups the other day (mostly on the
presskit) to remove some of the hardcoded urls.

Stefan