On Mar 2, 2012, at 7:21 AM, Nick Kew wrote: >> I'm not getting the value of leaving them there but not letting them be >> indexed. If they're there, they should be indexed. If they're not indexed, >> they might as well not be there at all. > > On the contrary! They're there for reference, for people who want > to find apache 1.3. If someone seeks out those docs then it makes > sense to provide them. > > The point of not indexing them is to avoid thrusting them on the > majority who want documentation of a current version. They pollute > search results when you google a directive or module name, and > may confuse the punters when something has changed!
But if someone's actually looking for 1.3 docs, they won't find them. The point of the 'rel canonical' stuff was that if someone's looking for 1.3 docs, theyd find them, but if they're looking for, say, DocumentRoot, they'd find the (at the time) 2.2 version of the file, not the 1.3 version. But, as to what the best course of action is, I'm not at all certain now much it matters. I'd be glad to throw an entry in the robots.txt and see if anybody hollers about it. I think that the result, however, will be that someone else's mirror of the 1.3 docs will start to emerge in the search results. -- Rich Bowen [email protected] :: @rbowen [email protected]
