Google search should refer to latest versions of Chapel docs

[bradcray]

As a Chapel Programmer, when I search Google for something in the Chapel documentation, it often refers to an old, outdated version of the documentation. I'd like it to always refer to the latest version of the documentation because that's the version I'm likely using.

acceptance criteria:
Google search for 'RandomStream' points to latest (e.g., 1.16) documentation rather than 1.14.

[bradcray]

From the online research I've done, the conventional wisdom for how to have Google prefer the "latest" version of a series of sibling directories which contain similar content differing by version numbers, years, etc. is to put the latest version up one level in the directory hierarchy. I.e., docs/foo.chpl would be preferred over docs/1.15/foo.chpl, docs/1.16/foo.chpl, etc. References:

• https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/99867/how-to-correctly-mark-up-different-versions-of-the-same-document-which-are-non-c
• https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/WyAoPsh4GNW

This relates to a question that I posted internally awhile back asking how people would feel about reflecting chapel/docs/latest/ up one level so that a given documentation file foo.chpl could be referred to via chapel/docs/foo.chpl rather than chapel/docs/latest/foo.chpl for shorter URLs and to avoid confusion about what "latest" means. However, at that time, I was only asking w.r.t. simplifying URLs rather than trying to optimize Google search. The reaction to that query was a bit mixed:

• @ben-albrecht was in favor and was the one who made the original proposal to me
• @GBT expressed minor support, wasn't concerned about asymmetry, but mostly wanted issue Provide version selection menu on Chapel Documentation page #8114 (now implemented)
  @mppf expressed a neutral reaction but agreed that "latest" was a potentially confusing label that we could improve upon;
  @lydia-duncan felt like the shorter URL was uninteresting and thought that preserving the symmetry was preferable.

I think that given the new data on Google search heuristics, it makes sense to try this reflecting of the latest docs up one level in order to see whether it improves our search results. It turns out to be an easy fix (took me 5 minutes to think about and 1 to implement) and unfortunately, I don't know of a way to test what Google will do without trying it (and waiting for it to update its crawl results).

I'm also open to other comments or suggestions.

[bradcray]

We released Chapel 1.22 on Thursday, submitted an updated sitemap.txt Friday requesting a re-scan, and today searching on "Chapel Random" turns up the Chapel 1.22 documentation. So I think our general approach and effort here (which I'd characterize as "only have docs link to current / master docs in the menu button to reduce the number of links pointing back to old stuff" combined with "make sure the current docs are at a shallower level of directory through symbolic links") has been successful enough to warrant closing this issue.

[bradcray]

A few years later, I still have some queries that return old web pages, and others that don't, but am getting more hits on the latest docs than the old ones than we used to. I'm also out of ideas about how to improve the situation.