Remove a Doc

When you delete a doc, its URL is also deleted. Visiting the old URL will return a 404 - Page Not Found error, which negatively impacts customer experience and can damage our SEO.

To prevent this, create a 301 redirect. Follow these steps to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the health of our docs site.

Prerequisites

• You'll need a GitHub account to contribute to Sumo Logic Docs.
• We recommend adding 2FA protection when contributing to Sumo Logic repositories.
• Help us keep Sumo Logic Docs open and inclusive by reviewing our Code of Conduct.

Step 1: Create a 301 redirect

As an example, let's say there are two docs called Nginx App and Nginx (Legacy) App, and we need to deprecate the latter.

1. In your GitHub authoring tool (like VS Code), open the cid-redirects.json file, which contains all 301 redirects.
2. Add a redirect from the old URL you're removing to the new URL containing the equivalent content.

   "/docs/integrations/web-servers/nginx-legacy": "/docs/integrations/web-servers/nginx",

Step 2: Update internal links

Ensure any internal links pointing to the deleted doc are updated to the new URL.

1. In your GitHub authoring tool, run a search for the URL you're removing. For example, if the legacy URL appears in other documents, replace all instances with the new URL.
   
2. Check with a Sumo Logic subject matter expert to confirm that you can replace all with the new URL.

warning

Never do a "Find All > Replace All", as this can break unrelated items like image paths. Replace each URL on a one-by-one basis.

Step 3: Delete the doc file

Delete the actual .md doc file from the repository (in this example, it'd be docs/integrations/web-servers/nginx-legacy.md).

Step 4: Remove doc from navigation

Remove the doc from the navigation menu (sidebars.ts file).

Step 5: Publish and test the redirect

Verify that the redirect works correctly and leads to the intended destination.

Optional steps

Add deprecation note

If you're deprecating one solution in favor of another (like in the above Nginx and Nginx (Legacy) example), you may also want to add a note in the new doc stating the legacy solution has been deprecated. Check with a subject matter expert to be sure.

Hide from search engine results

It can take months for an old URL to drop from Google search engine results. If you need to hide a page immediately from Google, open a GitHub Issue and provide the details for our site admin.