Add HTML meta tags "description" with QGIS version and for outdated docs "robots" with noindex

[pathmapper]

closes #6449

ref https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2023-March/065647.html

from #6449 (comment)

The missing version in Google result is problematic imho. Is there something we can/need configure on our side?

There's a good chance that Google/other search engines would use an HTML meta tag description for the snippet when displaying search results:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#meta-descriptions

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This PR

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Here's an example which demonstrates this: https://www.google.com/search?q=geoportal+niederrhein

Source of https://geoportal-niederrhein.de/

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I'm not familiar with the release workflow of the docs, but looking at the code I guess the specific version will be used here when building the docs for deployment:

QGIS-Documentation/conf.py

Line 49 in f8b046a

version = 'testing'

Would be great if someone could confirm 😄

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We could potentially add additional HTML meta tags there, e.g. to exclude outdated docs from search results.

Here are some options:

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/special-tags
• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag#directives

/cc @DelazJ @rduivenvoorde

[DelazJ]

@pathmapper Thanks for addressing this issue
I downloaded the artifact from github action and couldn't find the meta name info as shown in your screenshot above. Still get "docutils...". Any idea?
Anyway, TBH I'm a bit far from this topic and can't find time for the literature you point to (sorry!). But I'm happy to merge and see, if some more versed watcher gives a "GO!"

[pathmapper]

I downloaded the artifact from github action and couldn't find the meta name info as shown in your screenshot above. Still get "docutils...". Any idea?

Good find @DelazJ ! Looks like we were running into readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme#469.

I've implemented it another way and added also the page title to the content to have unique descriptions (which is recommended by Google).

But I'm happy to merge and see, if some more versed watcher gives a "GO!"

I think we have nothing to loose here - well, only the currently automatically generated snippets :-)
But if we loose them, we are going to have snippets including the version number. 🤞

[kgjenkins]

It's great to see this being addressed, and the proposed solution looks promising!

I'm wondering, though, if we might want to shorten the description a bit, since Google and others tend to limit the length of the snippet. Maybe instead of:

Documentation for QGIS 3.18 - 20. Working with Point Clouds

we use something like

QGIS 3.18 docs: 20. Working with Point Clouds

[pathmapper]

@kgjenkins thanks for your feedback. I don't think we have to shorten the description (there are much longer snippets around, also docs is used as abbreviation for doctors) but I do like your suggestion to move QGIS with version to the beginning (so we could also omit the word for):

QGIS 3.18 documentation: 20. Working with Point Clouds

That said, I have no strong opinion here.

[pathmapper]

@DelazJ should be good to merge (unrelated test failure).

[DelazJ]

OK let's then try