<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

What's the purpose for WW to use it for SE?

[sun818]

Hi, I noticed when I go to a WW thread through a search engine referral, the following meta tag is added the HTML:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

What's the purpose of that?

[Sinner_G]

That doesn't make much sense. That tag should tell robots NOT to index a page, so it should not be reachable through a search engine. Or did I misunderstand you?

[oilman]

what makes you think that this is the same page google indexed? ;)

[Dreamquick]

That doesn't make much sense. That tag should tell robots NOT to index a page, so it should not be reachable through a search engine. Or did I misunderstand you?

Unless of course they only want a certain view of each thread / forum to be indexed. I seem to remember that there are several different URLs for a single thread, so I suppose if they don't allow the non-primaries URLs to be indexed they avoid duplicate content penalties etc. as well as making their results look a lot less confusing.

Also adding a noindex if you aren't a bot would stop problems from people who save off a copy of the page but then put it online elsewhere at a later date.

<added>Oilman's comment would also explain it quite nicely</added>

- Tony

[sun818]

Also adding a noindex if you aren't a bot would stop problems from people who save off a copy of the page but then put it online elsewhere at a later date.

That makes sense. Thanks DQ.

what makes you think that this is the same page google indexed? ;)

I should have added that going to the same thread via my via web browser does not include that META tag. I'm guessing Brett presents a stripped down version web pages to the bots to make the crawling go faster.