News articles not indexed

[johnnie]

Why is that, for one of my sites, google refuses to index my news articles? When i search for the title, the social bookmarking entry pops up. I even sometimes find another site which has its own (unique!) version of the news item, citing my site as the source.

What's going on? My robots.txt is 100% fine.

Maybe its because I've put a meta noindex on my news browse pages that google sees the pages as orphans? I thought noindex,follow pages were still considered to be part of the network, even passing PR?

[tedster]

Yes, using a "noindex,follow" robots meta tag should mean that googlebot will still discover the urls that are linked to. However, spidering may be set to a lower priority (that's a guess) unless there is another click path to the new articles.

Are these pages Google News pages? Or just regular organic search?

[johnnie]

Regular organic. I also have tag pages, but I have also noindexed these. Currently, my news items are only reachable through noindexed-pages. I suppose that's not very spider friendly, but I want to prevent duplicate content. Am I being overzealous here and should I maybe allow my tag pages to be indexed?