[FLINK-9806] Add a canonical link element to documentation HTML

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.5.0
• Fix Version/s: 1.3.4, 1.4.3, 1.5.3, 1.6.0
• Component/s: Documentation
• Labels: pull-request-available
• Assignee: Patrick Lucas
• Reporter: Patrick Lucas
• Created: 11/Jul/18 12:38
• Updated: 26/Jan/21 12:05
• Resolved: 25/Jul/18 13:11

Description

Flink has suffered for a while with non-optimal SEO for its documentation, meaning a web search for a topic covered in the documentation often produces results for many versions of Flink, even preferring older versions since those pages have been around for longer.

Using a canonical link element (see references) may alleviate this by informing search engines about where to find the latest documentation (i.e. pages hosted under https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-master/).

I think this is at least worth experimenting with, and if it doesn't cause problems, even backporting it to the older release branches to eventually clean up the Flink docs' SEO and converge on advertising only the latest docs (unless a specific version is specified).

References:

• https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
• https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #6396