How do I move old content down in the search engine rankings?

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

I would suggest that external links to older versions get redirected to the latest version - with some sort of note that if you really needed version 5 the link is here.

Answer 2

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?

Answer 3

I think a lot of the problem deals with the fact that search engines give something a high rank if a lot of people are linking to a specific page. Unless you can get all the people linking to your old documentation, to link to your new documentation, then you are going to have a problem with the older documents being rated artificially high. In order to overcome this, you might need to change the way you handle documentation pages. One good way would be to always show the newest information on a particular topic, and then only by clicking on a link on the page, do you get to the older versions. Optimally, this would be the same page, with a different parameter, to state which version you want to get documentation for.

Answer 4

What about trying the MSDN approach? You assign a version tag to your pages. When this page is displayed, its version number is displayed as well. Users will be able to see immediately that this information is deprecated.

You may need to write some stubs for new version pages like "This problem has been resolved in the current version" so that the users don't have to think you didn't do anything in 5 years. Some writing work, some interlinking but it's doable for a limited number of problematic pages.