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Old doc versions pollute search engine results

See original GitHub issue

Like many developers, I typically start at Google when I am curious about a feature in Wagtail.

Usually, I get a link to an old version of the docs:

wagtail nested blocks - google search

Those docs will have a link like this at the top of the page:

freeform page content using streamfield wagtail 1 0b1 documentation

Because the docs change structure over time, that link frequently 404s.

In contrast, when I search for things in Django, I always see a link to the most recent docs.

It’d be nice if via robots.txt or some other mechanism, only the most recent docs were indexed by Google.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 7 years ago
Reactions:3
Comments:5 (3 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

chimenocommented, Sep 15, 2016

This is true, also happened to me. I would say the best way to tackle it is putting a <link rel="canonical" href="http://docs.wagtail.io/en/<last_stable_version>/<page_slug>"> in the <head>.

I will try to make a PR within this week if nobody does it before.

0reactions

gasmancommented, Sep 19, 2016

Have now updated our release process docs with some extra steps to ensure the canonical URLs get updated correctly. Not perfect, since there’s apparently no way to rebuild old versions that have been deactivated, but hopefully it will help…

I’ve also added a bunch of redirects based on going through all docs.wagtail.io links that have been posted on StackOverflow, and ensuring they all point to somewhere useful in the current version of the docs. I’m sure that’s not an exhaustive list, but probably the best we can do unless anyone fancies trawling through our Git history for all page moves we’ve done 😃 We’ll try to keep up the habit of adding redirects whenever we move docs in future.