[Python-Dev] Typo in PEP-0423

[Chris Jerdonek]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 4:35 PM, Benjamin Peterson <benjamin at python.org> wrote:
> We've played around with robots.txt, but it's still useful for old docs
> to be indexed (e.g., for removed features), which just need to figure
> out how to get them deprecation in results. I wonder if <link
> ref="canonical"> in the old docs would help.

Yes, this is probably the correct approach (though it's rel="canonical"):

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

It's always been an inconvenience when Google displays the docs for
different, old versions (3.2, 3.3, etc) -- seemingly at random, and
sometimes instead of the newest version.  Fortunately, this seems to
be improving over time.

By using rel="canonical", you would have control over this and can
signal to Google to display only the newest, stable version of a given
doc.  This would probably have other positive benefits like
consolidating the "search juice" onto one page, so it's no longer
spread thinly across multiple versions.  There would still be a
question of how you want to handle 2 versus 3.

--Chris


>
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2015, at 11:02, A.M. Kuchling wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 08:55:26PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> > Even once the new docs are in place, getting them to the top of search
>> > of results ahead of archived material that may be years out of date is
>> > likely to still be a challenge - for example, even considering just
>> > the legacy distutils docs, the "3.1" and "2" docs appear ...
>>
>> We probably need to update https://docs.python.org/robots.txt, which
>> currently contains:
>>
>> # Prevent development and old documentation from showing up in search
>> results.
>> User-agent: *
>> # Disallow: /dev
>> Disallow: /release
>>
>> The intent was to allow the latest version of the docs to be crawled.
>> Unfortunately, with the current hierarchy we'd have to disallow each
>> version, e.g.
>>
>> Disallow: /2.6/*
>> Disallow: /3.0/*
>> Disallow: /3.1/*
>>
>> And we'd need to update it for each new major release.
>>
>> --amk
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