[Numpy-discussion] How did Numpy get its latest version of the documentation to appear at the top of Google search results?

Aaron Meurer asmeurer at gmail.com
Fri Nov 13 14:20:06 EST 2020


I'm unclear from that issue what exactly was done that ended up
working. Was it the "moved permanently" redirect, or something else?
Did you use the webmaster tools? "Moved permanently" redirects aren't
an option if you want to host old version docs but still have Google
default to "latest".

For SymPy we got so tired of people ending up at old docs versions
that we just removed them (so now we only have "latest" and "dev"). We
don't support old versions anyway. But another problem I noticed is
that I had a fork of our docs repo on GitHub with the gh-pages branch,
and people were ending up at the version of the docs on my fork (I
discovered this from looking at the webmaster tools for my domain and
seeing that those pages were being clicked on from search results).

But two things I can recommend:

- Make sure the latest version of your docs use "latest" in the URL,
instead of a version number. That way when people copy the URL to
create a link, it will always point to the latest version (it looks
like Bokeh already does this).

- Poke around at the Google webmaster tools. There's a lot of good
stuff there, including a lot of good data on how people end up on your
site via Google searches.

Aaron Meurer

On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 9:43 AM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Have a look at here for "some" background https://github.com/scipy/docs.scipy.org/issues/39
>
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 5:37 PM efremdan1 <efrem.braun at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm working with Bokeh (https://docs.bokeh.org/en/latest/), another
>> open-source Python package. The developers would like to have the latest
>> version of their documentation appear at the top of Google search results
>> when users search for information, but knowledge of how to do this is
>> lacking.
>>
>> I've noticed that Numpy seems to have gotten this problem figured out, e.g.,
>> googling "numpy interpolate" results in the first hit being
>> https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.interp.html. This is
>> unlike Python itself, where googling "python string formatting" results in
>> the first hit being https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/string.html.
>>
>> So apparently someone in the Numpy developer world knows how to setup the
>> doc pages in a manner that allows for this. Would that person be willing to
>> post to the Bokeh message board on the topic
>> (https://discourse.bokeh.org/t/some-unsolicited-feedback/6643/17) with some
>> advice?
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from: http://numpy-discussion.10968.n7.nabble.com/
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