Release announcements should show up in Google over release notes

Yes, I'm observing the same. Basic comments:

• As long as the announcement link to the release notes and not back, we are basically already saying that the release notes are most important.
• If we want an X.Y announcement to be listed before X.Y.0 to X.Y.N release notes, we need the release notes to link to the X.Y announcement.

Not sure we can do that much SEO - headings seems to be a propriate at least. And the pages are just different - short versus a wall of text.

A side note: Should we create an URL alias https://www.drupal.org/blog/drupal-latest → that always links to the announcement for the latest release? Just like we have https://www.drupal.org/latest-release → / https://www.drupal.org/download-latest/zip →

I'm not seeing anything in the meta tags of https://www.drupal.org/blog/drupal-10-2-0 → that can be improved. We certainly can change the metatag configuration if there is something specific that can be improved.

We have limited ability to influence what Google decides to show.

What I think might help is more links to the announcement. Linking from the release notes to the blog announcement would increase its visibility and may convince Google to highlight it more. The core release notes template could be updated to mention the announcement.

Tagging so the release managers have a look at the suggestion in #4.

This could use design. Do we want one of the info bubble thingies? Does the release notes input format support the info bubble thingy?

I tested this out on the 10.3.0 release notes → :

What do you think? The code for this is:

<div class="note-tip">

<h3>Learn more about <a href="https://www.drupal.org/blog/drupal-10-3-0">Drupal 10.3.0</a>!</h3>

</div>

It's abusing the header cascade a bit; it should technically be an H2 or maybe not a header at all since it's an action, but the font was too large. So, we might want to have a d.o issue to do something about the CSS for this box on this page. In ideal world, this would actually be a separate field on release notes that we could put whatever we want in, and it would be displayed above the release notes body field rather than inside it. (And also above the tarball download links. Die, download links, die.)

I do think it might help to make the page title of https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/10.3.0 → "drupal 10.3.0 release notes" rather than "drupal 10.3.0" also.

@hestenet's suggestion for a /drupal-latest is a great idea also; release managers could literally implement that today so long as we add it to our release steps checklist to update the alias to each new blog post when we publish it.

I put the proposed fix in the IS.

Also removing the Google results screenshot from the IS since it distracts from the content of the issue -- we get it, not a top result. :)

If adding 'Learn more about Drupal X" helps, then let's do it. However, 'Learn more' doesn't tell me what to expect, it could be anything from more details to a fancy video. Maybe something like 'An introduction to Drupal X' would be better?

So the URL would be, https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/drupal-latest → ?

I think retitling "drupal 10.3.0" to "drupal 10.3.0 release notes" would make the most impact likely, but a crosslink definitely will help some. Looking forward to see how it affects the results later. I think we need to keep trying and see what works, no silver bullet probably.

Googling "Drupal 10.3.0" now has the release as first result and the blog post as second for me. This one has the cross link.

I tried the same again for "Drupal 10.2.0" and the blog post is also the second result, much better than when I tried in May. This one does not have the cross link.

I added a similar link to https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/11.0.0 → (linking the new Drupal 11 landing page).