Question

There is some precedent for search-engine-ranking-related questions on StackOverflow, so please don’t close this question. It’s programming-related to the extent that HTML META tags can be called “programming”.

Here’s the problem:

We make FogBugz, the software project planning and bug tracking suite.

Either we did a great job with our old documentation or a crummy job with our new documentation, but for most of the popular searches on FogBugz terms, documentation for our old versions comes up.

Here’s an example. For context, our current FogBugz version is FogBugz 7. The top two results for that search are for FogBugz 5, which is positively ancient.

As best I can tell, there are several options for getting these results out of the top slots, but each has problems:

• A NOINDEX tag, but what happens if someone is actually searching for help on an old version?
• Finding the incoming links to the old documentation and placing a NOFOLLOW on them to deprive the old docs of PageRank. Problem here is that it’s really fiddly to find the links to the content, rather than changing the content itself.
• The unavailable_after tag, which is just a time-delayed NOINDEX, with the same problem of removal rather than demotion.

I just want these old documentation versions to stop competing with our current versions, without being completely unavailable.

Answer 1

An approach I used in the past (3 years ago)

Change the URL to your old documentation, and change your own links to point to the new url. e.g. abc.com/docs/fogzbugz/v5/xyz becomes abc.com/docs/fogzbugz/ancient/v5/xyz

Using the old URLs, implement a 301 redirection to your new v7 content. e.g. a request to abc.com/docs/fogzbugz/v5/GettingStarted.html is redirected to abc.com/docs/fogzbugz/v7/GettingStarted.html

In this way, existing links from external sites will take browsers to the latest documentation, and inform indexing robots that the page has moved.

Google will find the new links to your old documentation by indexing your site, but there will be no external links, thus reducing page rank.

Google will also find the new links to your new documentation, and as more sites link to it, its page rank will increase and so take priority.

This worked for me on a small scale (100 or so pages) site, and visitor attempts to view the old content rapidly dropped off.

If a user does land on a v5 page, how about the MSDN approach of explicitly stating the version that the page describes, and providing links to the equivalent topic in the v6 and v7 docs?