{"id":245,"date":"2006-09-13T21:16:42","date_gmt":"2006-09-13T12:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-09-13\/245"},"modified":"2007-12-26T13:46:21","modified_gmt":"2007-12-26T04:46:21","slug":"better-search-engine-indexing-of-my-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-09-13\/245","title":{"rendered":"Better Search-Engine Indexing of My Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\nEvery so often I look at my server logs to see by what means people find\ntheir way<\/a> to pages on my blog. One thing<\/span> that's long bothered me is\nthat people's Yahoo! and Google! searches often bring them to my blog's\nhome page, rather than to the post-specific page containing the text that\nwas matched by the their search.\n\n<\/p>\n \n

\n\nFor example, my previous\npost<\/a> contains the text “There's a camera<\/span> collector in\nMassachusetts....,” and because my blog home page contains my five\nmost-recent posts, that post and its text will stay on the home page until\nI've written a few<\/span> more posts. If the search<\/span> engines index my blog home\npage, someone searching for, say, “camera collector” will be\ndirected to my blog home page. That's all fine and well.... until a few<\/span>\ndays from now and that post has been bumped off the home page, at which\npoint users following a link<\/span> from a search<\/span>-engine search-result page end up\nat the then-current home page and wonder where their content is.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nThe solution for this is fairly simple: tell the search engines to index\nonly the permalink pages (the individual per-post pages), and not the blog\nhome page, the index continuation pages, category pages, etc.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nI finally got off my rear and implemented this on my blog, so starting\ntoday, the search engines won't index my non-post pages. What got me going\nwas Fazal Majid's excellent writeup on blogging etiquette, How to Show\nRespect for Your Readers<\/i><\/a>, which I found<\/span> today (having only\ndiscovered his generally\nexcellent writing<\/a> yesterday). I'd already<\/span> known the general approach on\nhow to implement the “don't index me!” directives (one soaks up\nthese things working for Yahoo! for eight years), but I'd been too lazy to\nlook up the actual incantation needed. Fazal kindly included it in his\npost, and so I'd lost my last excuse for not going ahead and getting it\ndone.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nHaving done this now, I'm sure I<\/span>'ll see my blog's Google PageRank go\n\nto zero (from it's currently dizzying value of 5<\/b>), but as the title\nof Fazal's post indicates, it's all about respecting the reader.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nThere's real satisfaction in seeing that someone did a search<\/span> on\nsuch-and-such, and it brought them to a page<\/span> I've written exactly on that\nsubject. My photo<\/span> pages are particularly common, with people arriving via\nYahoo! and Google! searches for\n\n“japan temples<\/a>”,\n“presidential limousine<\/a>”,\nand\n“snowfall<\/a>”\n\n(to list just a few<\/span> actual examples from the hundreds that arrive every\nday).\n\n<\/p>

\n\nEven more so than with the photos, it's really gratifying to see searches like:\n    “nikon d200 compact flash tested”\n    “transcend compact flash for Nikon d200”\n    “test transcend flash”\n    “transcend 4GB 120x”\n    “transcend 4Gb CF card”\n    “transcend compact flash review”\n    “Transcend 120x Compact Flash Card review”<\/small>\n\nland on my “Timing a Transcend<\/span> 80x 4GB\nCompact Flash card with a Nikon<\/span> D200<\/a>” and\n\n“Update\non Transcend 4GB 120x compact-flash card<\/a>” posts, as happened\ntoday. Those having done the search certainly found exactly what they were\nlooking for.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nMost of my posts are just for keeping overseas family up to date on our\nlives here in Kyoto, but some of my posts have a broad<\/span> appeal, and I'm\nhappy to have them read and (hopefully) be helpful.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every so often I look at my server logs to see by what means people find their way to pages on my blog. One thing that's long bothered me is that people's Yahoo! and Google! searches often bring them to my blog's home page, rather than to the post-specific page containing the text that was matched by the their search. <\/p>

For example, my previous post contains the text \"There's a camera collector in Massachusetts....,\" and because my blog home page contains my five most-recent posts, that post and its text will stay on the home page until [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}