Bug 9331

Summary: searching on google almost always returns some outdated link
Product: [Infrastructure] Website Reporter: Igor Stoppa <igor.stoppa>
Component: web-contentAssignee: Michael Halstead <mhalstead>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: Medium CC: jefro, melissa, mhalstead, randy.macleod
Version: Production   
Target Milestone: Future   
Hardware: x86   
OS: Multiple   
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto: --- Type of Regression: ---
Verified: Documentation change: No (bug/feature does not impact docs)

Description Igor Stoppa 2016-03-23 13:59:54 UTC 
Precondition:

Just search on google for anything YP related.
Ex: search for "yocto megamanual"


Expected Outcome:

the link should point to the latest stable set of documents / manuals.
This should be the first link:
http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/latest/mega-manual/mega-manual.html



Actual Outcome:

the link hits whatever was the idea google had of the highest-ranking version
and this is a self sustaining issue: the more google reports outdated links, the more people will hit them and confirm that they are good

In the example, this is the first link:
www.yoctoproject.org/docs/1.8/mega-manual/mega-manual.html


Effects:
This is really annoying when one is looking for help/explanation and hits obsolete pages, missing the improvements added in the meanwhile.
After a while one learns to always check the url or add latest to the search parameters, but it's definitely not friendly towards newbies.


Possible solutions:
Dynamically add an header to the older docs, stating that it is superseded by another and provide link to it.

Collapse all the current versioned urls to the latest and introduce a different url scheme for older versions (ex: add "archived" in the url).
Comment 1 Igor Stoppa 2016-03-23 14:16:35 UTC 
Correction: I was wrong about "latest": even if I add "latest" to the search string, I'm still presented with the wrong link, so the situation is actually worse than what I described.
Comment 2 Jeff Osier-Mixon 2016-05-12 17:12:18 UTC 
Michael - can we tell google not to only index the "latest" directory?

thanks
Comment 3 Jeff Osier-Mixon 2017-06-20 21:20:04 UTC 
fixed in the new website! going forward we will hide the older versions of documentation behind robots.txt and in an archive, so only the current set is indexed.