As I understand them canonical URLs <https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en> distinguish between the same content accessed through different URL forms. Currently Google thinks the documentation is mostly located at www.sagemath.org/doc/ while we want it to appear at doc.sagemath.org/html/en, so the canonical links should help with that distinction. It's unclear to me that it will have any effect on combinat.sagemath.org/doc/, since that is much older content and Google should be able to tell the difference.
The biggest problem right now, however, is that Google is taking a very long time to index doc.sagemath.org at all. At the beginning of June I created sitemaps listing every HTML and PDF document in the Sage documentation and Harald submitted them to Google promptly. After about a month most of the PDF links were indexed and those documents appear at the new location. At about the same time less than a third of the HTML links were listed as indexed by Google. That figure has been steady for the last month, and is currently just a bit over one third. In order to prompt Google to index the sitemap, over the last month I have manually removed links to documents at www.sagemath.org/doc/ in Google's webmaster tools and added them to the index at doc.sagemath.org/html/en. This has had little effect: even links I've added manually several times still will not appear in a search including site:doc.sagemath.org. Google is just taking it's time to index the new location, even with an explicit sitemap of all HTML files. If someone knows a better way to prompt Google to index a sitemap I'm all ears, but I don't think it's possible. If we want the documentation to appear at doc.sagemath.org we simply need to wait until Google indexes things. Adding canonical links isn't likely to have an effect if the documents aren't getting indexed. Regarding combinat.sagemath.org/doc/ I don't think removing it is a displacement of the problem. This is the only other copy of the documentation in the sagemath.org domain. Presumably Google thinks it's relevant even though old because it is located in the same /doc/ directory where Google thinks the newer documentation is located. Removing it from the Internet and pointing to the newer version at doc.sagemath.org would be in the best interest of the entire Sage community, if anyone knows who has access to it. TL;DR waiting for Google to index... On Sunday, August 7, 2016 at 9:17:57 AM UTC-7, Harald Schilly wrote: > > Yes, you are right, this sounds like a really good idea! > > -- h > > On Sun, Aug 7, 2016 at 6:14 PM, Volker Braun <vbrau...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> Presumably Google decided that combinat is the canonical url, right? >> Hiding combinat is only kicking the problem down the road, there are >> presumably many copies of the Sage docs hosted somewhere. The correct >> solution would be to include a <link rel="canonical" href=" >> http://doc.sagemath.org/path/to/help.html"/> in our docs to >> disambiguate. For example like in >> https://github.com/Pylons/pylons_sphinx_theme/pull/8/files >> >> >> >> On Sunday, August 7, 2016 at 5:25:56 PM UTC+2, William wrote: >>> >>> I'm googling for links to the sage reference manual, e.g., >>> >>> >>> https://www.google.com/search?q=sage+Elements+of+Quotients+of+Univariate+Polynomial+Rings&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS691US691&oq=sage+Elements+of+Quotients+of+Univariate+Polynomial+Rings&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.1153j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 >>> >>> >>> and they now **all** go to combinat.sagemath.org. I had expected to >>> find links such as >>> >>> >>> http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/polynomial_rings/sage/rings/polynomial/polynomial_quotient_ring_element.html >>> >>> >>> but nope. >>> >>> -- >>> William (http://wstein.org) >>> >> > > > -- > Harald Schilly -- SageMath, Inc. > https://cloud.sagemath.com > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
