Robots Set To noindex

t3nacity · August 08, 2008, 06:28:05 AM

Upon looking at my default skin index.template.php I noticed this in my <head>:

empty($context['robot_no_index']) ? '' : '
	<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

That means my forum will not be indexed correct? Why would that be in there?

niko · August 08, 2008, 06:47:17 AM

It's conditional case.

$context['robot_no_index'] is set on only pages that are duplicates of others, which is said to help indexing.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=234844.0

Deprecated · August 08, 2008, 09:41:27 AM

I'm pleased that you brought this up, and glad that Niko pointed us to the other thread.

I had noticed the code but after a cursory inspection I decided it did not conflict with my ='index,follow' preference. I see now that print versions of pages are set to not index, thus following the principle that you don't want duplicate pages indexed because it may hurt your search engine ranking. This is due to people who are trying to hack their SEO page ranks by submitting large numbers of identical or substantially identical web pages, so the SEOs have began penalizing such behavior.

I'm writing a mod to add a new type of page to SMF, one that most will have no reason to want indexed, and the reason I'm pleased is because now I know how to override my index/follow with a noindex/nofollow by setting context['robot_no_index'].

karlbenson · August 08, 2008, 10:20:45 AM

@Deprecated
Yes, SMF 2.x improves the noindexing of duplicate content pages.

Deprecated · August 08, 2008, 10:46:24 AM

Others should check into optimizing their robots.txt file so as to prevent search engines from venturing into areas they should stay out of, like SMF's ?action= commands. There is a discussion here at SMF forums but I forgot where it is. Time to go get another cup of coffee I guess.

t3nacity · August 08, 2008, 03:03:04 PM

So just leave it be?

karlbenson · August 08, 2008, 05:43:58 PM

Yes.

PatrickForum · April 15, 2012, 05:17:37 PM

How can we add noindex to all the ?action parameter pages on the SMF forum?

News:

Robots Set To noindex