Guides for obsolete LibreOffice versions appear in search results

I searched for “libreoffice calc pivot table”. In DuckDuckGo and Google, the very first result is “Chapter 8 Pivot Tables - LibreOffice”. Hooray, just what I want.

But the result URL is Chapter 8 Pivot Tables , i.e. a guide for version 7.1, an unsupported LO version last updated in 2021. You have to realize that you’re reading documentation for an older version of LibreOffice and that documentation for the newer version you’re probably using is available.

This is similar to bug 118235 that I filed, “obsolete LO wiki help pages dominate Google search results”. There were various suggestions in that for obsoleting old docs and/or de-emphasizing them in search results and/or putting an “older version” banner on them.

HI @skierpage !

Welcome to the documentation forum.

I’m glad you found the page through the search engine and it is important to understand that the search engine algorithms are not under the control of the website owners.

The so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of fluid techniques that aims to improve the results but too often the rules changes and mistakes/errors/tampering-attempt actions can result in a ban from their crawlers, turning your website invisible to them. Tracking the SEO rules is a time consuming job and must be done for all brand of SE.

In summary, the SE robots crawling is done organically and we cannot force the SE to index our website at the time we want. It is done at their discretion.

Cheers
Olivier