Misleading Google search entry when searching for notifications-plugin

[GitToTheHub]

Bug Report

Problem

When I want to search for the plugin "cordova-plugin-local-notifications" with the keywords "cordova plugin notifications", I get a outdated documentation for the cordova-plugin-dialogs plugin for the cli version 2.5.0 as result.

Is it necessary, to let outdated documentation appear in google search? Could outdated documentation be removed or archived?

What is expected to happen?

In the search results you should not see the outdated documentation for cordova-plugin-dialogs. Users could misinterpret, that cordova supports local notifications.

What does actually happen?

The outdated documentation for cordova-plugin-dialogs is shown.

Information

Environment, Platform, Device

Mac OS Ventura, Safari, Google

Checklist

• I searched for existing GitHub issues
• I updated all Cordova tooling to most recent version
• I included all the necessary information above

[breautek]

We can't really control how search engines indexes their search results. I think the best we can do is start adding noindex meta tag on pages that are ancient, but it wouldn't necessary stop Google from associating another version of dialogs with the "local notification" keywords, as they are similiar. (In fact, the dialogs API uses the notification namespace). noindex would simply stop specific versions from appearing in the search results, in theory. It will be up to the search engines to honour this rule, but Google should be in that group that does honour meta tag rules, considering they are the ones that is also documenting noindex.

Could outdated documentation be removed or archived?

We tried something similar to this in the past, purely to speed up builds, but failed to push a PR through as community members felt like we needed to maintain links and avoid 404s. If a link is specifically targeting an older version, then redirecting it to a different version is also not acceptable. So I don't think these versions are going anywheres.

But I think we can probably start adding a noindex rule on the old versions, maybe every version up to the last 2 or 3 versions.

[GitToTheHub]

But I think we can probably start adding a noindex rule on the old versions, maybe every version up to the last 2 or 3 versions.

Sounds like a good solution.

Regarding keeping old documentations:
I understand the (technical) reasons why the community wants to keep the old articles. But keep documentations from cli version 2.5.0 and older is hard to understand. Because i think you cannot any longer build a useful app with cli version 2.5.0.

If a link is specifically targeting an older version, then redirecting it to a different version is also not acceptable.

Why is this not acceptable?

[breautek]

If a link is specifically targeting an older version, then redirecting it to a different version is also not acceptable.

Why is this not acceptable?

Last time we attempted to remove large amount of pages that were obsolete were the translated documentation. They weren't kept up with the latest document and often had severely out-dated information. A lot of this documentation had no english counterpart either as the english documentation was removed. There was a lot of resistance simply redirecting to a 404 as can be seen in the original PR #1015

Ultimately that PR failed to got merged but a new PR was created to redirect when possible, and 404 otherwise and that was accepted.

But keep documentations from cli version 2.5.0 and older is hard to understand. Because i think you cannot any longer build a useful app with cli version 2.5.0.

To be clear, I understand and yes keeping those documentation around today is probably nearly pointless. Personally I actually agree. I'm just simply stating that we've had resistance before when mass removing documentation. At the very least, I think we need to make a Dev Mailing List to announce intent to remove old documentation, which versions should be removed, and see if the community today agrees with the that motion.

However, if we jump back to the original issue:

When I want to search for the plugin "cordova-plugin-local-notifications" with the keywords "cordova plugin notifications", I get a outdated documentation for the cordova-plugin-dialogs plugin for the cli version 2.5.0 as result.

I'm not certain that removing or applying the noindex rule on old documentation pages will ultimately solve that problem. Like I mentioned before, dialogs and local notifications are similar, and dialogs uses the term notification quite frequently as it's part of it's API namespace, which is likely why google brings up that page as a relevant search result, even though they are two completely separate things and don't address the same problem. So even if we applied the changes discussed, I would expect that Google and other search engines will start showing a page like https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/11.x/reference/cordova-plugin-dialogs/index.html in place of an older version, which doesn't necessarily solve the original problem, and to be frank, I don't think that's a problem we can solve.

[GitToTheHub]

Thank you for clarifying me, which problems occured in the past about the removal of translated documents. A 404 is not nice and should be avoided. In the end they found a solution and merged the pr. So there can be a solution.

At the very least, I think we need to make a Dev Mailing List to announce intent to remove old documentation, which versions should be removed, and see if the community today agrees with the that motion.

That's a good idea. Why should we keep outdated documentation on cli versions that can no longer be used to make an executable app?

About the original issue. You wrote:

So even if we applied the changes discussed, I would expect that Google and other search engines will start showing a page like https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/11.x/reference/cordova-plugin-dialogs/index.html in place of an older version,

If this would be really like this, this would be anyway better than before, because if you see the 2.5 doc, the title just says

Notification

with the description

Visual, audible, and tactile device notifications.

The new doc would have the title

cordova-plugin-dialogs

and the description

This plugin provides access to some native dialog UI elements via a global navigator.notification object.

It is much more clear, that this article is about Dialogs and not local notifications.

And if the new documentation would have a similar ranking in google it should be listed in the search results, but it isn't.