When setting up a new Suricata cluster, I referenced the documentation frequently and noticed Google returned documentation results from a few different versions. It might be worth enabling Canonical URLs on Read the Docs for more consistent results that point to the latest version.
https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/canonical.html
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Hi Nico,
As far as I can tell this is more about making sure all the documentation is indexed under a single hostname, which I believe helps with Google SEO. From the linked documentation, I don’t see how it would help with versions. As, I believe, we only serve documentation from one hostname, the setting described in that link won’t actually help us.
Do you have more insight here?
Thanks.
It ensures the documentation is indexed under one URL not just one hostname. For example:
https://suricata.readthedocs.io/en/suricata-5.0.1/quickstart.html
could point to:
https://suricata.readthedocs.io/en/suricata-5.0.3/quickstart.html
A great example of this was the Python documentation. It used to have terrible SEO until they made the latest version canonical
Ok, I see how that can be useful. Unfortunately I don’t think Readthedocs gives us this option. We just have one URL we use now, suricata.readthedocs.io, unfortunately to enable this “canonical” feature we have to add another domain, then set the canonical one. Would be nice to set the canonical version independent of the URL.
I’m not too keen on 5.0.1 pointing to 5.0.3 for all users. Does this redirect only apply to crawlers?
There is not really a “redirect”. It is more a suggestion to crawlers that there is one latest version.
I’m not sure the on the specifics on ReadTheDocs implementation. I see no reason it would require a domain change.