Jeremy Stanley
March 19, 2020 at 6:22 PM

I'm pretty sure Apache .htaccess rules could manage that without any
client-side scripting. I know it has ways to define conditional
redirect behavior depending on whether specific files exist or not.
Yep. I think you could do this with RegEx and maybe enhance it with some javascript.  Adding Sebastian and JP to this thread to hopefully catch up :)
Eric Fried
March 19, 2020 at 6:10 PM

Slightly heavier-weight, but potentially much more useful, can't the link do some js for you (either on page load or when you click it) to probe, in order:

- The page you were looking for, s/$release/latest/
- failing that, the root of the project, as Ben suggests
- failing that, the current behavior

efried
.

Ben Nemec
March 19, 2020 at 6:04 PM




I just ran into this and I think there's a middle ground that would still help a lot. Right now if you click on the banner to go to the latest release it redirects you back to the main docs.openstack.org page. Could it at least redirect you to the root of the project you were already looking at? I realize that might break on project renames, but that seems like a massively smaller problem to solve than trying to keep track of internal structural changes in each project's docs.

Jeremy Stanley
March 14, 2020 at 9:20 AM
On 2020-03-14 14:05:32 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote:

On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote:

[...]

It would be really great if when you click the current release
is X button at the top of the page it would reload the same doc
and just replace the release instead of directing you back to
the home page of the doc release.

[...]

yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change
how that baner is create but i basically always ignore it because
it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more helpflly
making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both
be greate improvemnts.


The solution to the technical problem is straightforward (even a
simple HTML form element would to the trick), the bigger challenge
is logistical: Content moves around between releases, it's not just
renamed but often gets split or combined too, and lots of times
folks don't think to include redirects from old filenames when they
make major edits like that. All too often when I'm looking something
up in the published HTML copies of our documentation I'll land on
the wrong version, edit the URL to a later release, and get a 404
for that file. Someone (really multiple someones) will need to do a
thorough audit to work out what redirects we missed between previous
releases as well as coming up with ways to better remind folks to
add redirects and maybe leave other breadcrumb trails when making
future changes.
Sean Mooney
March 14, 2020 at 9:05 AM
On Sat, 2020-03-14 at 09:36 -0400, Donny Davis wrote:

On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 5:53 PM Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org> wrote:


Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>
March 13, 2020 at 4:33 PM
On 2020-03-13 20:59:30 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote:
[...]

Yep, this trips me up fairly often as well. The pattern of serving
multiple versions of documentation is a fairly widespread one, far
beyond just OpenStack circles, so maybe we should look at some other
examples and see if we can reverse engineer how they manage to
direct search results to their latest versions. For example, why do
searches for Python module names return results under
https://docs.python.org/3/ before they return results for
https://docs.python.org/3.5/ ? I briefly skimmed the page sources
for some examples but nothing jumped out at me, nor did the site's
robots.txt provide any insight. Perhaps SEO specialists know what
trick is at play there?

I will add it to my list of questions.  Normally you'd do it with
redirects to the latest, but that doesn't help if you're trying to keep
archived documentation.

Sean Mooney <smooney@redhat.com>
March 13, 2020 at 3:59 PM

On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 15:46 -0500, Jimmy McArthur wrote:

Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed
below:


Jimmy McArthur <mailto:jimmy@openstack.org> <jimmy@openstack.org>
March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM
Hi all -

We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search
placement for all OSF projects.  I'd like to crowd source this on each
of the project mailing lists, so the community is able to be
involved.  Could you all help out in providing the below:

“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if
you only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay)
- open infrastructure
- ?

At least 3 competitors
- AWS
- ?

Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will
help best filter for relevance
- ?

honestly the only think i would like to see is fixing the search result so that the 'latest' version of all our doc
are at the top of the list instead of pike.
the docs for our older release always come up first and its hard fo fine the direct link to the 'latest' version
which
tracks master.

granted i have it save in my broswer history but when users are looking for docs on things it would be nice if they
got
the more recent docs.

Cheers,
Jimmy


Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org>
March 13, 2020 at 3:46 PM
Sorry - I accidentally left Zuul keywords and examples in there. Fixed
below:


Jimmy McArthur <jimmy@openstack.org>
March 13, 2020 at 3:27 PM
Hi all -

We've contracted a professional SEO firm to help improve search placement
for all OSF projects.  I'd like to crowd source this on each of the project
mailing lists, so the community is able to be involved.  Could you all help
out in providing the below:

“Wish List” of keywords: 8-12 big terms you think fit your domain (if you
only have 4-5 to share, fewer is okay)
- open source ci
- ?

At least 3 competitors
- Jenkins
- ?

Any other input on positioning, offerings, etc. that you think will help
best filter for relevance
- ?

Cheers,
Jimmy




It would be really great if when you click the current release is X button
at the top of the page it would reload the same doc and just replace the
release instead of directing you back to the home page of the doc release.

yes althought that is not a SEO thing i think we need to change how that baner is create but
i basically always ignore it because it does not do what i want so removing it entirly or more
helpflly making it link to the latest verion of the current doc would both be greate improvemnts.

[image: image.png]