Indexing AskMe

November 11, 2005 8:42 AM

For Ask.Mefi, please tell Google to only index the individual archive page for each question, rather than indexing the monthly archives, the tag index, etc.
posted by chunking express to Feature Requests at 8:42 AM (7 comments total)

Many times when I search, the bulk of the results are the monthly archive pages. For example, if I search for Nintendo DS, this archive page is one results rather than this specific question that is listed on that archive page. (The specific page doesn't even show up.)

You can use the robots meta tags to tell google to "noindex, follow" archive and list pages, and "index, follow" the specific pages.
posted by chunking express at 8:42 AM on November 11, 2005

good idea. I'll do that with mefi too.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:47 AM on November 11, 2005

You could also add '-"all archives" -"posts tagged with"' to your searches, like this.
posted by Plutor at 10:05 AM on November 11, 2005

Thanks Plutor. I still think it's a good idea to do by default, as ending up at one of those pages isn't helpful.

Thanks Matt. Just to be clear, the meta tags you would need to add are: <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /> (for individual archives) and <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /> (for all other pages).
posted by chunking express at 10:39 AM on November 11, 2005

Aren't those two meta tags exactly the same? Shouldn't the second one be <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:56 AM on November 11, 2005

Yes. Yes it should. Well, unless you didn't want to do anything differently. Damn it.
posted by chunking express at 11:40 AM on November 11, 2005

yeah, noindex, follow on the monthly archives. I do the same thing already with user pages.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:40 AM on November 11, 2005