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How do we stop the 3.4/4.0 version of the documentation coming 1st in google?

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Michael McAndrew:
when you do a google search for example for civicrm hooks  (https://www.google.com/search?q=civicrm+hooks) the 3.4/4.0 version comes top, which is pretty bad/annoying.  Any idea how we can stop this?

Dave Greenberg:
Not sure what the right way to do this is?? Did some googling and it seems like we can stop Google (and other robots) from indexing the older CRMDOC* spaces using a robots.txt file or adding a "no index" meta tag (<meta name="robots" content="noindex">). However, folks may want to find the 4.1 version for instance - so what we really want to do IMO is have the latest wiki space version float to the top of results. I found info on setting a "canonical" URL - but not sure it can apply to a directory:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Do other folks have more experience / guidance on this?

Michael McAndrew:
in case they don't answer here, I've added this to the roadmap to look at at the documentation. i am sure the might civibrains will come up with something...

xavier:
Hi,

Between two almost identical pages (eg the 4.1 and 4.2 versions of the hook page), google will choose the one that has the most inbound links. The trick is to get more pages linking to the 4.2 (or 4.3 or whatever the latest version) than the previous ones.

Unfortunately, as now the "main" url for any page contains the version, it means that people links to that page in the forum, and that link will be a link to an obsolete page as soon as a new release arrives (and given lobos' drive, it's going to arrive sooner than later ;).

IMO the solution is to always use the same url for the latest version (so the latest version of the hook is always

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+hook+specification

This version never becomes read only and is always the working version, and when 4.3 is out, you copy the page to
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM42/CiviCRM+hook+specification for archive purpose and set it read only.

And voila. no need to mess up with the rel=canonical or noindex (although it would help), overtime CRM as a name space will get more links than CRM40 CRM41 or the other versions and the freshest content win

X+

Dave Greenberg:
Seems like we can start using CRMDOC as the "actual" space-key starting when we make CRMDOC43 the 'stable' version. The only downside is that the URL for each version's wiki space is controlled by the spacekey (e.g. CRMDOC42, CRMDOC43) - and you can not change the spacekey. So we would need to copy CRMDOC43 to a new space - CRMDOC (and similar each time we set a new stable version).

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