Guido van Rossum <[email protected]> wrote: > We just need someone with SEO experience to fix this for us.
I'm not an SEO expert, but I think a possible approach would be using (or partly abusing) the <link rel="canonical"> element on the documentation pages: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066 Python's documentation is already using these canonical links, just in an incomplete way: The Python documentation for 2.7 and 3.5 and later has a <link rel="canonical"> pointing to the generic documentation URL of the same major Python version, e.g. in https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html you can find this in the page source: <link rel="canonical" href="https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html"; /> This is why if you search for "python 3 $module" in Google, you'll never see a direct link to the 3.5 or 3.6 versions of the documentation (because Google merges them with the generic docs.python.org/3/), but you still results for versions 3.2, 3.3 etc. of the documentation (because the lack the canonical links). A very good step would be to also add this canoncial link to the documentation versions 3.0-3.4, this will make docs.python.org/3.3/ etc. vanish from Google and probably rank the generic docs.python.org/3/ higher than now. And now to the abuse part (I'm honestly not sure how well this would actually work): If you would add such a canonical link in docs.python.org/2/ pointing to docs.python.org/3/ (at least where the same module exists in both versions), you would eventually hide /2/ from the search results. If you don't want to be so extreme (people still want Python 2 documentation if they search for "python 2 $module") you could remove the canonical link just from the specific docs.python.org/2.7/ which will then be ranked much lower than docs.python.org/3/ in the search results, but at least still show up. Sebastian _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
