: How to handle redirects to versioned content? Given the situation that docs.foo.com/2.9 is the documentation for a product, revision 2.9 and docs.foo.com/3.0 is the documentation for a product, revision

@Gail5422790

Posted in: #Redirects #SearchEngines #Seo #Versioning

Given the situation that

docs.foo.com/2.9 is the documentation for a product, revision 2.9 and
docs.foo.com/3.0 is the documentation for a product, revision 3.0

Then you might want another URL

docs.foo.com/latest that redirects to docs.foo.com/3.0, until revision 3.1 launches. When the newer version becomes available, it should then lead to docs.foo.com/3.1.

Should docs.foo.com/latest be a 301 redirect with Cache-Control no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate?

Search engines are supposed to index docs.foo.com/2.9, .../3.0 etc., and it would be nice if they recognized .../latest as the most relevant one and therefore favor .../3.0 over .../2.9, and later .../3.1 over the former two.

Does docs.foo.com/latest require additional configuration? Like, should it be disallowed to be indexed directly per robots.txt, or is there a special header that can be set to indicate that this is redirect that refers to the latest version of some content?

There is also the problem that currently docs.foo.com is equivalent to docs.foo.com/2.9, but docs.foo.com then changed and became equivalent to docs.foo.com/3.0. The 3.0 version has a different structure of its sub pages, so that 404 errors error.

Can docs.foo.com be made equivalent to docs.foo.com/latest, so that it also redirects to the latest version, e.g. docs.foo.com/3.1 and search engines be forced to update their indexes to prevent 404 errors if you follow obsolete docs.foo.com links (which were meant to refer to 2.9)?

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