Not able to view the latest version document page created in the Confluence when searched keywords in Google
Asked by Moiz Ahamed:

I have question regarding the SEO optimization of the pages. We use Confluence 5.4 enterprise version for documentation in my company. When a user searches for particular module/feature in Google, he is always directed towards the older version of the document which is really confusing for the end user. But we would like make sure that the latest version of the documentation appears in the top results and make older version appear at the bottom.


Answers:
author: Steven F Behnke
body: Atlassian uses the /CONF/ space as their current version. They copy the space to something like /CONF053/ when they release a new version (like 5.4).

With this method, google should always be pointing to the latest version, period, in addition to indexing your older versions as people search for them.


author: Jackie Wheeler
body: I think what Moiz means is that the Google results are for pages in a previous version of the docs, that is, in an older space. We have the same problem. For example, the docs for version 5.0.0 of our product is in the space titled IS500, and when we updated the product to 5.1.0, we created a new space titled IS510. When a user searches in Google for information on using our product, the top hits are for the 5.0.0 space, but we want to guide them to results for the latest version, which is 5.2.0. We added a banner in the space header of 5.0.0 pointing them to the home page of the latest docs, but I'd rather it pointed them to the same page in the newest space. I was thinking that the URL could be a search query in the latest space, but I'm not sure how to get the title of the current page to populate the query (remember, this banner is in the space header, not manually added to each page). Any ideas?


author: Rodney Hughes
body: same answer - when I GOOGLE my file it only shows the one entry (try it yourself) - when I click the link it only goes to the latest version of that page even though there are a few versions of that page


author: Moiz Ahamed
body: Thanks Rodney,   
I guess I didn't explain clearly. I was mainly talking about the pages not about the attachments. The issue which we face is the whenever a customer searches for a topic page he always land in older version page. The latest version of the pages is always at the bottom of the search results.


author: Rodney Hughes
body: Beats me ... ![sad](/html/@C495B4504065515364EB1894F812B34C/images/emoticons/sad.png "sad")

only thing I can suggest is to give the link to the main page, not the document itself

But I don't know how you control the random GOOGLE search

I mean ... if I do a GOOGLE search for "Sequence Components.xlsx" I get my main page <https://ideology.atlassian.net/wiki/x/EwBPAQ>, not the attachment to the main page, so despite a few versions of that spreadsheet users are always going to get the latest version


author: Moiz Ahamed
body: Yes, exactly we use it for public documentation. For example, when the users searches for Material Editor functionality in a graphic engine for version 4.0 in google. The results in google always point to the same topic but from the older version such as 2.5 or 3.0. But ideally it should point to the latest version of 4.0.  

Can you guys provide any suggestion on how to point to the latest docs rather than the older version. Its really confusing for the users.


author: Steven F Behnke
body: They could be using it for public documentation, in which case users find the documents by google.


author: Rodney Hughes
body: This is not an answer - just a comment.

I'm not sure why you are using GOOGLE to search Confluence. That is surely going to be a limitation of how the GOOGLE search is configured??

When you attach files to a Confluence page, whether embedded on the page or just via the Ellipsis (three dot) icon, you always ONLY see the latest version when you first look at it.

To see the previous versions you need to specifically use the Ellipsis\>Attachments and use the "\>" chevron to the left of the file name.

That is the whole power of Confluence attachments that it effectively does the document version control for you. Adding a GOOGLE search over that just seems to me to be a backward step??