Opened 12 years ago
Closed 10 years ago
#18922 closed Bug (duplicate)
Proliferation of dev docs on search engines confuses newbies
Reported by: | Dan Loewenherz | Owned by: | Dan Loewenherz |
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Component: | *.djangoproject.com | Version: | 1.4 |
Severity: | Normal | Keywords: | |
Cc: | markus.magnuson@… | Triage Stage: | Accepted |
Has patch: | no | Needs documentation: | no |
Needs tests: | no | Patch needs improvement: | no |
Easy pickings: | no | UI/UX: | no |
Description (last modified by )
I brought this issue up earlier today at DjangoCon, but the basic issue can be summarized hence:
- User searches to find info on a specific feature, gets directed to dev documentation.
- Said feature (on the development version) is backwards incompatible with previous versions of Django.
- User does not know better, assumes Django has a bug.
- Invalid bug is filed in trac.
EDIT: rejected proposal removed, see comment 4.
Change History (17)
comment:1 by , 12 years ago
Owner: | changed from | to
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comment:2 by , 12 years ago
Resolution: | → wontfix |
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Status: | new → closed |
comment:3 by , 12 years ago
This issue wasn't opened with a specific solution in mind--it's just illuminating that this is a problem. I get if the solution I presented is a bit too drastic, but I think closing this ticket ignores the real issue.
comment:4 by , 12 years ago
Description: | modified (diff) |
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Resolution: | wontfix |
Status: | closed → reopened |
Triage Stage: | Unreviewed → Accepted |
Yes, we can keep this ticket to track other ideas to resolve this problem.
For the record, the original proposal was:
Hopefully, removing the dev documentation pages from search engines will help solve
this issue, since those who want to read the dev docs can just click through to
them by using the version navigation at the bottom of the docs pages.
I think there is a small subset of actual Django users who run their applications
on trunk. I don't have data to back that up but I can't imagine it's a lot.
I talked with Alex earlier today about how to deal with this issue--he also suggested
redirecting users from dev -> 1.4 (or whatever the latest version is). I initially
thought it was a good idea, but I thought about it and realized you would have to at
least add some sort of referrer check. I then thought whether it would be ok to do
something like
def conditional_documentation_redirect(request): if not request.META['REFERER'].startswith("http://docs.djangoproject.com"): return HttpResponseRedirect #... and so on
This felt wrong to me because if that sort of check were in place, users would
no longer be able to permalink to dev docs.
comment:5 by , 12 years ago
comment:8 by , 12 years ago
Status: | reopened → new |
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comment:9 by , 11 years ago
Is it a reasonable request that any version of the documentation other than dev and the latest release should be hidden from search indexes entirely?
Tried searching for "django authentication" on Google now, and it shows dev, 1.5, and 1.4, in that order. I think 1.4 should be hidden to avoid this kind of thing.
comment:10 by , 11 years ago
Cc: | added |
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comment:12 by , 11 years ago
Just out of curiosity, how are versions 1.3 and below hidden from search index?
(They are all in the sitemap, so obviously search engines see them there, although with low priority.)
comment:13 by , 11 years ago
They aren't hidden, and depending on what you're searching Google can still return various more or less recent versions of the docs.
Our main problem is that the docs for each new release duplicate content from previous releases, and Google favors the original URL in this case.
Canonicalizing /en/1.5/ (or whatever the current version is) => /en/stable/ may help.
comment:14 by , 11 years ago
Does that mean that /en/stable/ should be included in sitemap.xml with priority 1, instead of the latest version (i.e. /en/1.5/). Or should both variants be in there? Or are we talking redirects?
Sorry to hassle you with a lot of questions, but I'm looking to hopefully improve the situation, because I'm annoyed by the proliferation too :)
comment:15 by , 11 years ago
Has patch: | unset |
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comment:16 by , 11 years ago
Eric Holscher just pointed me to http://docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#can-i-make-search-engines-only-see-one-version-of-my-docs.
We could use that to point search engines to the stable version.
comment:17 by , 10 years ago
Resolution: | → duplicate |
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Status: | new → closed |
Moved the last action item to https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/issues/242
Thanks for the suggestion.
I understand the idea, but I'm not ready to wipe the dev docs from Google's index. People should be able to find information about an upcoming feature by googling its name.
Besides, we take care to mention in which version new feature are added. And closing invalid tickets is cheap. The most troublesome change was the new
{% url %]
, and the flow of tickets eventually stopped.tl;dr The cost of the solution seems too high to me compared to the magnitude of the problem.