[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 118235] New: obsolete LO wiki help pages dominate Google search results

Tue Jun 19 01:40:39 UTC 2018

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118235

            Bug ID: 118235
           Summary: obsolete LO wiki help pages dominate Google search
                    results
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: Documentation
          Assignee: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: info at skierpage.com
                CC: olivier.hallot at documentfoundation.org

If you do a Google search for "LibreOffice Calc help", the top result is 
  Welcome to the LibreOffice Calc Help - LibreOffice Help
  https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Welcome_to_the_Calc_Help
  Jul 19, 2013

that page and most of what it links to look plausible, but they seem to all be
old wiki help pages that are obsolete. E.g. "Main page" is
https://help.libreoffice.org/Main_Page ; if you navigate to Menu help at
https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Menus , it completely omits the Styles menu;
etc. Many of the other links in Google search results are similarly to old wiki
pages, including "Spreadsheet functions" and "Functions by category". Only the
second result
  LibreOffice Help
  https://help.libreoffice.org/
redirects to up-to-date 6.0 help.

I assume you don't want to update this old wiki help material. Some mix of the
following would address the problem:
* Each help wiki page should display "DEPRECATED, OLD HELP FOR VERSION 3.14,
online help for recent LibreOffice now starts at
https://help.libreoffice.org/". A MediaWiki template or modifications to the
wiki skin could do this.
* You could take the technique that redirects help.libreoffice.org to
version-specific help, and reuse it on these wiki pages.
* You could add rel=canonical links to the <HEAD> of wiki pages that link each
page to the latest documentation, which would encourage Google to rank these
pages lower than up-to-date documentation in results.
* You could simply delete these wiki pages (the Wayback machine has them), or
archive them on another site.

I'm sure there's a bug about deprecating old wiki help pages, but I couldn't
find it. Outdated wiki content is the bane of documentation :-)

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