Small SEO suggestion regarding documentation

Community Zone
#1

When googling iati-standard related documents, I often times get old documentation. It might be preferable to have a /latest/ URL, and refer to that throughout the website, so Google can index it instead of older versions of IATI. Hence, http://iatistandard.org/202/activity-standard/ would become http://iatistandard.org/latest/activity-standard/.

#2

Thanks for this suggestion @bryanph - we’ve noticed that the v2.01 documentation seems to be preferred by Google over the latest v2.02 pages.

In light of the IATI Technical Team’s ongoing work on Dashboard coverage at the moment, we have limited capacity for other improvements, but I’ll try to have a look at this over the coming days, with the aim to add a /latest/ URL as suggested.

As a side point, similar functionality already exists if no version number is specified in the URL- for example http://iatistandard.org/activity-standard/iati-activities/iati-activity/sector/ redirects to the v2.02 documentation page at http://iatistandard.org/202/activity-standard/iati-activities/iati-activity/sector/

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#3

Part of the reason that 2.01 documentation is preferred is due to this sitemap http://iatistandard.org/202/sitemap.xml which still contains /201/ urls.

https://github.com/IATI/IATI-Standard-SSOT/blob/version-2.02/combined_gen.sh#L31 uses a file called URL in the same directory to populate this. That probably needs updating.

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#4

Thanks for the diagnostics on this one Ben. I’ve changed URL in that file in our development environment and it’ll get pushed though to the outputted site map when we next do a full regeneration.

I’m tempted to add this URL file to git tracking, although there may have been a reason why it wasn’t when initially created? Just thought I’d ask…

#5

I think the reason this is not in git is that you want the same branch/commit to be deployed in different places. E.g. it might be first deployed on dev.iatistandard.org with one URL, and later on the live site with a different URL. OTOH, this might no be a problem in practice, so adding it to git may be worthwhile.