[Qgis-community-team] old docs on website

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 3/8/21 7:50 AM, Harrissou wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I thought that adding a banner with link at the top of the pages (I know that one is perfectible in 2.x versions), setting a canonical url and a bunch of page redirections would help us mitigate the issues. Any idea how long it could take to have the canonical url be the first result ( afaiu, the latest docs is now among first results while 2.8/2.2 used to be the first years ago)?
> For information, a related issue report and discussion at https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation/issues/6449 <https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation/issues/6449> (I have no knowledge on these SEO things and would welcome more experts inputs).
> 
> Would killing 2.x docs push latest to the top? While quite old, I met recently two users (in different contexts) that were bound to these 2.x versions due to their computer limitations (iirc a mac user in one case, through kyngchaos). And with the current pandemic situation where everyone needs a computer that works, it's likely that not all can get one running all the recent libraries of 3.x. And l guess docs is still necessary for them (we do not have zipped html for these, do we?).

I don't know, /me no SEO expert neither.
But hitting 2.8 docs... when googling for trivial thinks is not what you want.
Not sure how deep spiders crawl, but we have an awfull lot of old stuff hosted:
My hope is that if spiders get 404/'not found's that it will 'learn' to not put it in the results anymore:

FYI:

$ du -hs *
0       2.8
255M    doc-test
532M    QGIS-Documentation
1.9G    QGIS-Documentation-1.8
5.6G    QGIS-Documentation-2.0
5.9G    QGIS-Documentation-2.2
6.6G    QGIS-Documentation-2.6
7.7G    QGIS-Documentation-2.8
7.2G    QGIS-Documentation-2.14
6.3G    QGIS-Documentation-2.18
8.0G    QGIS-Documentation-3.4
12G     QGIS-Documentation-3.10
9.9G    QGIS-Documentation-3.16
11G     QGIS-tests
11G     QGIS-Website

And we serve all, from
https://docs.qgis.org/1.8
till 
https://docs.qgis.org/3.16
:-)

Regards,
R