cronjobs: inject canonical URLs into older manual pages (SEO) #1241
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The GRASS GIS manual pages of the different versions have been published for a long time with a difficult to understand concept of being invisible, redirected or shown, which also strongly affects the search engine ranking. SEO: Without indication of "canonical" URLs different versions wipe each out out in search engines. Canonical tags help consolidate duplicate or similar content by specifying the preferred version of a page, ensuring search engines index and rank the desired URL while avoiding duplicate content issues. This PR changes the cronjob scripts to - inject "grass-stable" as the "canonical" into older manual pages under versioned URL - inject "grass-devel" as the "canonical" into the development manual pages under versioned URL Like this no "duplicate content" from a SEO perspective should occur. Also `robots.txt` is updated to reactivate the manual pages of old GRASS GIS versions (which now contain "grass-stable" as the canonical). Fixes OSGeo/grass#4579
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Note: these files are now deployed on grass.osgeo.org for testing. |
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Wouldn't the grass-devel and grass-stable primary content be rather similar, thus being potentially penalized as duplicates? How does this method handle pages that don't exist in later versions, or are renamed/moved? |
… to point to "stable" manual (rather than "devel")
Very good point. Deployed update on grass.osgeo.org, triggered cronjob and told Google Search about it.
A few of them are handled with redirects in Apache. I would not know any other method. |
The GRASS GIS manual pages of the different versions have been published for a long time with a difficult to understand concept of being invisible, redirected or shown, which also strongly affects the search engine ranking.
SEO: Without indication of "canonical" URLs different versions wipe each out out in search engines. Canonical tags help consolidate duplicate or similar content by specifying the preferred version of a page, ensuring search engines index and rank the desired URL while avoiding duplicate content issues.
This PR changes the cronjob scripts to
Like this no "duplicate content" from a SEO perspective should occur.
Also
robots.txtis updated to reactivate the manual pages of old GRASS GIS versions (which now contain "grass-stable" as the canonical).Fixes OSGeo/grass#4579