Doc URLs have changed - search engine links no longer work

[Steven Skoczen]

It appears that all of the documentation URLs have changed.

This means that google searches for a particular piece of documentation now dump the user back to the default doc page.
(E.g. search "django template", see the page google returns, then click and see the different page the django site returns)

The behavior breaks "Cool URI's don't change", and generally makes searching the docs with google worthless.

It appears the URL change was to support multiple languages, and while that's good, the old URLs should still resolve to something useful (perhaps the english, or most common language's docs for that item?)

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

That was unfortunate, but we know it's happened. There's not really a lot we can do about it, since the documentation has been heavily refactored, so there isn't a single page to redirect to and we're not going to go through (and you can't redirect by anchor anyway, since they're client-side only). So it's unfortunate, but also unavoidable.

[Wolph]

Sorry for reopening this ticket but I believe there is still a large improvement available.

Although the links by themselves might not be fixable, changing the status code from 302 (temporary redirect) to 301 (permanent redirect) should take care of the search engines. Otherwise the Google pagerank will be lost or reduced quickly, with a permanent redirect it will be transfered to the new url.