Frank_Rizzo - 6:46 pm on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

What about subscriber only daily listing pages.

e.g. Each day I list all Widget Events for each city.

Boston: Widget World, Widget Expo
Elmira: Widgets R Us

The widget_events.html page is world readable, but only subscribers can access the event pages. Thus to prevent SEs indexing or knowing that the events pages exist I set:

a rel="nofollow, noindex" href="boston/widget_world.html
a rel="nofollow, noindex" href="boston/widget_expo.html

This way SEs don't get a boilerplate 'login to view' page recorded against each page. Is this now not a good thing to do?

Yes I could disallow widget_world.html in robots.txt but there could be thousands of combinations of cities and events!

And what is the difference between rel="nofollow" and a nofollow meta tag on each page? Is it now also a bad idea to use

meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"

I thought these were *good* practices even if some had tried to use it to sculpt PR. Surely it is still ok for non informational pages such as login pages, copyright notices, privacy info pages.