TheMadScientist - 3:53 am on May 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

Just another little note on this topic and the associated terminology.

Most of the distinctions I'm trying to draw are purely semantic for most intents and purposes... It does not really matter to the average person if they 'visited a page' or if they 'requested a resource and it was sent to them so they could view it'. It's much easier and descriptive enough of what happens to say 'visited' which implies the resource stays where it is and they went there, even if what really happens is the browser basically says 'hey, send me the contents of 'blah' so it can be displayed.'

The differences in this type of conversation, when dealing with resource savings, bandwidth, crawl rate, pages crawled, etc., are important to draw IMO, because unless people understand how things work and the fact the contents of the resources are actually 'sent' to the requester rather than being 'visited' they really can't figure out what saves resources and what does not.

I think quite a bit of what's been said could be a full thread on it's own, so I'll not elaborate too much more, but I think it's important to understand the process a bit better than the general terminology implies to really understand where 'resource savings' occur which is different than what may appear to be 'resource savings' and is really only 'display difference' by the SEs.

The noindex tag does not really save any resources or even change crawl frequency in my experience, but it changes what the SEs show in the results, even for a site: search, so it might appear to 'save resources' (crawl budget, bandwidth, server use) unless people understand what is actually happening and why the results displayed change with it's use.