[Development] Harmonizing the Qt 5.x Documentation

[Pasion Jerome]

Hello,

The redirects are giving the expected results, which is to redirect people to the Qt 5 latest and increase that documentation set's exposure. The Qt 5 pages are bubbling up to the top, from my testing.

The real (as real as can be) solution is to start the de-emphasization of Qt 4.8 documentation, either by removing it or limiting the exposure to it. Right now, we dictate the priority relationship between Qt 4.8 and Qt 5.x documentation through our sitemaps. This mechanism, really isn't enough. If the other SEO techniques are giving us improvements, then I would rather not remove pages (not yet anyways).

I looked into canonical URLs, but I don't think it is a problem for us because there are no separate Analytics results for the various URLs for the Qt 5 documentation.
I also looked into the other mechanisms, but since reference material is not the "premiere" content in the internet, those techniques may not give us the desired impact.

Note that the doc publishing process is tied to the Qt releases, meaning changes in the content or structure won't be published until the next Qt release. Much of the changes to the 5.2 documentation were implemented months ago, but we had to wait for the release to get those changes out.

Give it a week or two and let me know if a specific pattern emerges, though. Different people receive different results for the same search terms.

Cheers,
Jerome P.
Documentation Engineer - Digia, Qt
________________________________________
Fra: development-bounces+jerome.pasion=digia.com at qt-project.org [development-bounces+jerome.pasion=digia.com at qt-project.org] på vegne av Rutledge Shawn [Shawn.Rutledge at digia.com]
Sendt: 14. april 2014 09:14
To: André Pönitz
Cc: Smith Martin; development at qt-project.org
Emne: Re: [Development] Harmonizing the Qt 5.x Documentation

On 13 Apr 2014, at 8:10 PM, André Pönitz wrote:

> Shawn wrote:
>> On 2 Apr 2014, at 6:07 PM, Ariel Molina wrote:
>>>
>>> Please whatever you do, do not break this anymore, the current
>>> state is already messed up.
>>
>> I agree.  But I think the idea was to change it one last time and then
>> never change it again, and the docs that google finds should be always
>> the latest rather than a particular version.  I hope that goal is achieved...
>
> I hope the same, and hope dies last...
>
> Experience is another thing, though. Judging from the last half-dozen or so
> changes redirection worked better in theory than in practice.

Maybe we should be doing this

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

<link rel="canonical" href="…">

Not that I know much, just now googled how to do that...
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