Re: [Tools-discuss] Google Scholar not indexing Internet-Drafts

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2021-07-29, at 18:57, John R Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> The other issue is that Google Scholar isn't finding any of the three copies of RFCs on our servers.

Ages ago I had copies of all RFCs in some PDF form on our servers and finally got some bibliography servers to index them.  That must have been 15 years or more ago, I don’t remember the details.

Clearly, Google Scholar should be taught to find the canonical RFCs at https://rfc-editor.org/rfc - having many secondary copies is an SEO anathema.

Internet-Drafts, hmm.  Many are not arxiv quality, and we don’t want the I-D repository as a dumping ground for people who just want to get their garbage into Scholar.  But the main problem is that the references to the drafts will stay active even when the RFC has been published(*) (or the I-D replaced), so we should be very careful with what we offer under the URI that will be indexed.

Let’s stop kicking the can on the doc.ietf.org thing!

Grüße, Carsten

(*) E.g., I get https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-core-observe-09.html as the first hit for CoAP Observe.  No metadata block, seven versions off, ...