Re: blogs.gnome.org, permalinks, and robots=noindex

[Jeff Waugh <jdub gnome org>]

<quote who="Nigel Tao">

> Basically, the noindex-ability of the blog pages seems IMHO (1)
> arbitrary and (2) wrong.  Normally, in good open source style, I'd
> write a patch, but I don't know what software is running
> blogs.gnome.org, so instead I'm making noise on this list.

It's currently running newsbruiser (though I've been investigating a port to
WordPress MU, which will rock very hard).

> My suggestion would be to scrap the <meta name="robots" ...> tag
> entirely - I don't see why would we want to hide from searchers (GNOME
> users!) the same content we proudly share on p.g.o.  If indeed there
> are good reasons to noindex (e.g. avoiding duplicate search results,
> although search engines are good enough these days to skip dupes), I
> say make [1] (the blog's homepage) and [5] (the permalink) index, and
> [2], [3] and [4] (yearly / monthly / daily summaries) noindex.

Agree. Unfortunately, NB has basically fallen out of maintenance, so your
best bet is to patch ours for the time being.

Thanks,

- Jeff

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