Blosxom: hiding category and archive pages from search engines
I’ve long been concerned that people finding my weblog via Google or other search engines get directed to my archive or category pages (like gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/scrivener) instead of the individual entries. A whole year’s postings may contain enough terms to lead people to it, even though the individual posts don’t.
This is annoying for users and wastes bandwidth. I didn’t know how to fix it until I found this article by Fazad Majil. It described my problem exactly and recommended putting the following meta tags in the <head> of the relevant pages:
<meta name="robots"
content="noarchive,noindex,follow,nocache" />
This will allow the pages to be followed but not indexed or cached.
The problem was how to distinguish chronological archive and category
pages from the main page or story pages. The solution was Barijaona
Ramaholimihaso’s
pagetype
plugin. This gives you a variable you can check against with
interpolate_fancy.
My head.html template now contains the following code:
<?$pagetype::pagetype like="(category|chrono)">
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,noindex,follow,nocache" />
</?>
I haven’t noticed a significant slowdown in traffic to the affected pages, but that will take some time.
Next up is getting “Previous” and “Next” links up to each story. Barijaona has a plugin for that too, prevnextstory, but I haven’t had time to implement it yet.
Posted at 11:46,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
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