[Meta] Improve web search (SEO) experience for modern Drupal by properly de-emphasizing Drupal 7

Problem

Drupal 7 has been marked as end-of-life since January 2025 → which means that now all effort is focused on Drupal 10 and beyond ("modern Drupal" for short). The way modern Drupal works from Drupal 7 is radically different and resources for older versions of Drupal are unhelpful and confusing for people who are using or want to use modern Drupal.

With new.drupal.org we're making a great push to improve the branding of Drupal, promote what an awesome framework it is, and find new adoption. However, if I search for things related to Drupal in search engines, then a lot of it is entirely unhelpful. Even with over 10 years of Drupal experience it still takes a lot of effort to filter through the results and find things that work for modern Drupal.

We can not control sites like StackOverflow (or Drupal StackExchange) which contain a lot of content. However, we can significantly improve how Drupal.org itself appears in search engines and ensure that it's easier for people to find content that's still relevant.

The main goal is be to make it clearer for automated systems (search engines) and humans (framework users and prospective users) to identify content that can be ignored because it is for Drupal 7. It is expressly not the goal to remove content because we do not want to break people's existing links and bookmarks.

Proposed Solution

There are various places where we can make changes and these can be split up into independent valuable items. For search engines the main way of communicating that we no longer want content to show up is to use a noindex meta tag (or equivalent header). For users the right way is likely a banner that explains Drupal 7 is end of life and points to more up-to-date information. An example of such a banner can be seen on the Bootstrap 3 website.

Tasks

Not all of the below tasks are content and some may have to be spun out into separate issue queues, but it should be a coordinated effort to improve discoverability of relevant modules and documentation.

• Add noindex to https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/7.x and children
• Add end-of-life banner to https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/7.x and children
• Change default filters on https://www.drupal.org/project/project_module → to show only modules compatible with currently supported Drupal versions
• Add noindex to module project pages that do not have any version releases compatible with supported Drupal versions.
• Add a banner to module project pages that do not have any version releases compatible with supported Drupal versions. (This can be seen by scrolling down, but at that point you may have already read a long module page description)