I don't know this special case, but extracting a tar-ball archive will usually have a version number in it's path/directory name and this is good.
What you refer to is that when it is finally installed, after something like
./configure
make
make install
it should not contain version numbers in the path. From the most software I have configured and installed this way, they were not using a version number neither in the path nor in the final binary.
I suggest you either try this on a test box and check if after the make install there is anything not ok with version names showing up somewhere OR you type ./configure --help and see if there is some --prefix=<somedestinationpathyouspecify> you can use to tell it at which destination it should be installed.