Old vs. new community

[Jeff_F]

I've noted that searching Google for Canvas how-to tips brings us to pages in the old community.  For example, search Google for 'Canvas edit profile' (or most anything else) and you will see the links point to the old community...  Google 

I am curious as to the plan to switch this over so the results include the new community pages while excluding the old community?  Is this a challenge updating two sets of pages?

Thanks, Jeff

[Stef_retired]

 @Jeff_F ​, I've shared your question with the good folks in Documentation.

[scottdennis · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeff,

That is an interesting question.  We did leave the old guides site live and have no plans at the current time to retire it as some people have embedded guide articles in courses and we don't see a compelling reason to break those links.  It isn't an extra workload for us to keep both sites up to date because the documentation is maintained in a third site that pushes automatically to both the new and old community sites.  At far a Google search results go, I'm hazy on how exactly Google calculates them but I think it has to do a lot with how many links point back to a given resource.  Over the past six months or so we have seen the total number of page views in the old guides site steadily decline while page views in the new site have increased at a slightly steeper rate.  I personally have noticed a few hits on the new site creeping into to top listed sites in my own googling.  I would guess that over time we will see that trend continue.

[Jeff_F]

It is very reassuring to know it is no extra work to have both and that each is up to date.  I was thinking it would be a challenge to maintain and as the Google search results are still resolving to the old set of pages, customers may link to these old pages thus perpetuating their use. But since they aren't going to expire that really doesn't matter.  Cheers~!