CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Might it be possible to add a rel=canonical tag to older documentation so that Google does a better job of indexing the most current form of documentation? So for example if:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC42/Installation+and+Upgrades"/>

was added to the page on http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC41/Installation+and+Upgrades then Google would probably point people to the most up-to-date version instead of the old documentation.

IMO, the main solution is to keep the most up to date version with the same url

That makes sense... for good measure it might be good to add rel=canonical to any older versions with different URLs too.

Hey there,

We have been wrestling with this for a while.  Do you any of you want to push it forward? If so might be worth putting together a proposed solution for comment.  We discuss a little (i seem to remember there were some down sides as well that we might have missed in this discussion so far) and then implement.

So we have two options:
- the existing one: by default any link goes to an obsolete version when there is a new release*
- the suggested one: by default any link goes to the latest release, even when written for an older one

I'd venture it's far less common to want to create a link to a page in a specific release than to whatever is most recent. At least when I do a search, I often end up with an old version and have to navigate the wiki to find the most recent version but hardly ever end up on the latest version but needs an older one.

As for the links embedded into the civicrm installs, we might indeed have a CRM43 that redirects to CRM until there is a 4.4 version and there is a "real CRM43" readonly namespace when CRM becomes the document for the 44 version.

I don't know if it's already the case, but the version can be a param of the urldoc, so we won't have to modify (and retranslate) all the texts that contains a link to the wiki

X+

*strictly speaking, you can replace CRM{version} by CRMDOC when you write the url, but hardly anyone does that outside of the book.

I "think" fixing things for Google search is a bit separate from how we encode embedded linkages on CiviCRM.org and in CiviCRM installs (help text primarily). The current approach for the embedded linkages problem (which seems decent) is that all links use CRMDOC (without version) - and we redirect requests w/ that pattern to the latest stable version wiki space.

Example:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/2.+Install currently redirects to http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC42/2.+Install

This doesn't help w/ Google searches however, and I don't think we have page level control over HTML headers on the wiki. Not sure what else we can / should do for the search situation?

I replied w/ a possible solution here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,25784.msg119688.html#msg119688