No-index meta tag on just Tags & Archive filter list pages - My Forums

No-index meta tag on just Tags & Archive filter list pages

timmyd — Mar 17, 2015, 10:04 AM

Hi,

I need to add a no-index, no follow meta tag on just the pages that list blogs filtered by tags, year archives & their respective pagination results. The main blog pages should not have the tag.

So these would be pages where the URL is "blog/2014/11","blog/tags/opinion" , "/blog/?tag=opinion&page=2, 3 4 etc".

Is there a way to detect if these pages are showing so I can write out the meta tag, as they all use the same Articles template?

Many Thanks,

Tim.

Re: No-index meta tag on just Tags & Archive filter list pages

wshawn — Mar 17, 2015, 11:15 AM

You can do what I said with Articles, though I am converting everything away from it.

Don't follow any of the links on this page:

There is no reason to do this and you will probably include links in a category you want them to follow.

Don't follow where this link goes:

sign in

I have been using Articles for years and have never experienced any negative SEO effect by leaving those pages alone. In fact I have found it helps.

Watch the video on this page:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

Re: No-index meta tag on just Tags & Archive filter list pages

timmyd — Mar 17, 2015, 10:21 AM

Quote from: wshawn at Mar 17, 2015, 03:12 PM

You could always put it on the individual links in the chunk templates used by getResources (or whatever you are using) to create the lists in those pages. It is cleaner.

Thanks, If you mean not using Articles to serve the tags & archive pages then that is probably the best way, but we're stuck with using Articles for this now. Our SEO team are adamant that there needs to be a meta tag - apparently no follow on actual links is a no-go, and robots.txt can't cater for no-follow. So we'll have to find a way to insert the tag conditionally if the page is a tag or archive list.

I could use PHP to read the URL to detect it, though it seems messy, perhaps there is a more elegant solution?

Re: No-index meta tag on just Tags & Archive filter list pages

wshawn — Mar 17, 2015, 10:12 AM

You could always put it on the individual links in the chunk templates used by getResources (or whatever you are using) to create the lists in those pages. It is cleaner.