[
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-13571?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=16874253#comment-16874253
]
Alexandre Rafalovitch commented on SOLR-13571:
----------------------------------------------
I guess, one place to start thinking this through is on how important it is
that users find the reference manual. As a reference, Stack Overflow (and rest
of the network) have more focus on being discovered by Google than on their
internal engines. Obviously, they have too, as that's where money and attention
is. But it is still an interesting explicit goal post.
For us, if the users cannot find a relevant reference guide page quickly, they
may
* think a particular feature does not exist
* join and ask on the User Mailing list
* discover the reference guide in general and browse through it
* discover the reference guide and use our - still limited - internal search
None of the options above seem optimal compared to leveraging the public search
engine. But then, we have to worry about SEO. Clearly, the current SEO works
well enough to get us to the 6.6 version of the guide and - very importantly -
to a somewhat relevant page. Switching that to be a single target page would be
easier for us, but may cost a lot of SEO. And, frankly, I am not at all sure
that our guide is SEO-friendly enough on its own. I just did a search for
MappingCharFilterFactory (as an example) and 6.6 RefGuide is at the top
followed by (old) Javadoc, (old) Wiki, two source-code class links and then
random websites and blogs. Latest version link just does not seem to appear in
the first couple of pages (though 7.x clone of the RefGuide on some Chinese
community site does).
I suspect that Google is detecting multiple guide versions as duplicate content
and therefore only displays one version and the 6.6 version has more weight due
to redirects. But if we remove/collapse that link, I am not sure if the
correct/latest version of the manual will be picked up. This feels risky to me.
I don't know what the optimal solution is, given the limited resources
available for this part of the project. I am just really worried that lost
Google ranking is hard to get back. Perhaps, as a minimum step, we could just
refresh the URL map periodically to use whatever latest version is.
> Make recent RefGuide rank well in Google
> ----------------------------------------
>
> Key: SOLR-13571
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-13571
> Project: Solr
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Security Level: Public(Default Security Level. Issues are Public)
> Components: documentation
> Reporter: Jan Høydahl
> Priority: Major
>
> Spinoff from SOLR-13548
> The old Confluence ref-guide has a lot of pages pointing to it, and all of
> that link karma is delegated to the {{/solr/guide/6_6/}} html ref guide,
> making it often rank top. However we'd want newer content to rank high. See
> these comments for some first ideas.
--
This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA
(v7.6.3#76005)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@lucene.apache.org
