Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 9:50 am
Tony, just saw the recent spate of eejits who insist on posting in the Noticeboard forum. I believe most of these people find their way to this forum via a search engine and are not deliberately clicking on Noticeboard before posting (maybe some site stats could prove this).
Therefore, would it not be prudent to stop search engine bots from indexing any page on the Noticeboard forum? Depends on how customisable the board is, but if you could simply insert some meta tags onto the pages, it should do the trick. For example :
To prevent a Search Engine from indexing a page, place the code below between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">
This tag tells the robots not to index this page and not to follow any links within the page.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
This tag tells the robots not to index this page, but follow any links within the page.
A more radical approach could be to not index ANY of the forums/posts. This would prevent people arriving at the forums direct from a search engine without even bother to visit the main website (they could of course then visit the forum after that).
Therefore, would it not be prudent to stop search engine bots from indexing any page on the Noticeboard forum? Depends on how customisable the board is, but if you could simply insert some meta tags onto the pages, it should do the trick. For example :
To prevent a Search Engine from indexing a page, place the code below between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">
This tag tells the robots not to index this page and not to follow any links within the page.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
This tag tells the robots not to index this page, but follow any links within the page.
A more radical approach could be to not index ANY of the forums/posts. This would prevent people arriving at the forums direct from a search engine without even bother to visit the main website (they could of course then visit the forum after that).