'canonical' tag pointing to 'current'?

[raboof]

For Akka, we currently publish documentation for each version. Unfortunately this often leads to Google pointing to old versions of the docs, and while our 'please read the current version' javascript helps, it'd be nice if people were pointed to the current docs in the first place.

We have a /current symlink that always holds the current version of the docs, perhaps we should allow generating a canonical link pointing to that URL for each page, telling Google that's the page to index..

[ktoso]

👍
I think I did that manually for akka at some point, but it should indeed be done by default in the engine

[rstento]

I've dealt with this issue in the past by not using a version number in the URL for the "latest" version of doc. I don't know how easy/hard that is for you to do. Then, I used robots.txt to keep the Google crawler from indexing the older versions (which were in a version-specific hierarchy). Google complains about having content it can't crawl, but seems to penalize less for this than for having multiple pages with duplicate content, which causes it to rank you lower against pages from other domains that contain similar content. Once this is set up, you can go into the Google search console and specifically ask it to remove a page and all of it's children from the index. Of course, Google is also always changing the way they crawl and rank content, so who knows how long will work. <https://get.bitmoji.com/c/Eoo3Dw>

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On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 3:22 AM, ktoso ***@***.***> wrote: 👍 I think I did that manually for akka at some point, but it should indeed be done by default in the engine — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#109 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AV1De8U3Eyf7VYS4rVZqhgNgsE48_Gqgks5r2DlAgaJpZM4NPCwT> .

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[raboof]

We already have a 'current' symlinked to the current version, so that part is easy.

Good recommendation on the robots.txt, that looks like a nice 'quick win' for us!

The advantage of 'canonical' tags over robots.txt is that any 'link worth' associated with the 'old'/versioned pages will be transferred to the 'canonical' page, so that might still be a nice option to add to paradox.

[rstento]

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 10:16 AM, Arnout Engelen ***@***.***> wrote: We already have a 'current' symlinked to the current version, so that part is easy.

But, it apparently isn't being "understood" by Google? Is this similar to the issue discussed here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/1qRHESzvH3s ?

Good recommendation on the robots.txt, that looks like a nice 'quick win' for us! The advantage of 'canonical' tags over robots.txt is that any 'link worth' associated with the 'old'/versioned pages will be transferred to the 'canonical' page, so that might still be a nice option to add to paradox.

Yes!

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[ennru]

Akka's Paradox template adds canonical meta-data:

https://github.com/akka/akka-paradox/blob/a21cf15ad6a13e02e0bc85c89e796e1cf12edaa2/theme/src/main/assets/page.st#L9

[ennru]

Google's information about duplicated URLs and canonical.

[ennru]

Fixed with #289 which uses the sbt homepage setting by default.