[sefs]

I just wanted to start a discussion on tag / tagging.

How important is it to you.

I've disabled it in my installation because I can't see a reason for it, as well as it seems to put a drag on the system. When I click on a tag for instance it takes twice as long to return results as it would for a normal seach on the same keyword. and a normal search returns more results.

I took a look at digg, and they don't seem too big on tags either.

Is it something useful / important that we can't do without?

[Divisive Cotton]

I've disabled it as well.

I think it will confuse the average user of my site. Being history, I expect an older age range, who, unlike the yoots, are necessarily that familiar with social bookmarking.

Asking to pick a category and then tags adds too many choices.

I have a rule when designing a website - give the user as little options and things to click on as you possibly can.

I watch my mum, who is 73, surf the web and see how a novice can easily become frustrated with too many choices on any one page.

The upside would be an SEO advantage. I've not used the tags function so not quite sure how it works - does it give a separate page for each tag?

[sefs]

I like the tags because I realise that google somehow indexes them and most of my hits come from when google indexes links to the tags.

But I hate it because it takes way too long for a page to load when I click on a tag. I think it's because its not paginated. And probably since the tag table gets huge. It has to be resource intensive to process all those tags when doing a join with the links table to get the search results.

I hope tagging as a web 2.0 poster boy goes the way of the dodo.

P.S. On the cloud page the tags can give you one page per tag it looks like, but by default only 100 tags are listed on the cloud page, and 5 on all other pages in the left bar.

I am not sure if its the 100 most popular tags on the cloud page or what.

Who in here is using tags, and who has it disabled.

[Andtony]

I'm usin tags and find them useful when browsing sites. Although I've noticed that my users aren't clicking them too much so maybe tags aren't the most important thing to have. And as you've listed Pligg has some lacks with the tagging function but I'm sure that those issues will be fixed sooner or later.

I think that you shouldn't let Google index your search(tag)-pages because it raises the risk of double content. Having double content can drop a lot of your pages to the Google's supplemental index and that weakens your site's position in search results. I'd also recommend that you prevent Google and other search engines from indexing all the non-essential pages of your site because that gives more power to the essential ones like front page and story pages.

[sefs]

Andtony this is what my robots.txt look like

How can I adjust it to prevent google from indexing the search/tag pages

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.php

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /blog/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /mobile/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /sitemap.php
Disallow: /index.under.construction.html
Disallow: /index_maintainence_in_progress.html
Disallow: /index_old.html
Disallow: /robots_old.txt
Disallow: /news/
Allow: /news/faq-en.php
Allow: /news/index.php
Allow: /news/rss.php
Allow: /news/story.php
Allow: /news/upcoming.php

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /mobile/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /sitemap.php
Disallow: /index.under.construction.html
Disallow: /index_maintainence_in_progress.html
Disallow: /index_old.html
Disallow: /robots_old.txt
Disallow: /news/3rdparty/
Disallow: /news/avatars/
Disallow: /news/backup/
Disallow: /news/cache/
Disallow: /news/evb/
Disallow: /news/evb_default/
Disallow: /news/icons/
Disallow: /news/internal/
Disallow: /news/js/
Disallow: /news/libs/
Disallow: /news/modules/
Disallow: /news/plugins/
Disallow: /news/templates/
Disallow: /news/templates_c/
Disallow: /news/404error.php
Disallow: /news/Config_File.class.php
Disallow: /news/LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /news/README.txt
Disallow: /news/Smarty.class.php
Disallow: /news/Smarty_Compiler.class.php
Disallow: /news/Smarty_Test.class.php
Disallow: /news/Smarty_Test.php
Disallow: /news/admin_backup.php
Disallow: /news/admin_categories.php
Disallow: /news/admin_comments.php
Disallow: /news/admin_config.php
Disallow: /news/admin_editor.php
Disallow: /news/admin_index.php
Disallow: /news/admin_links.php
Disallow: /news/admin_modules.php
Disallow: /news/admin_users.php
Disallow: /news/antispam.txt
Disallow: /news/begin_gzip.php
Disallow: /news/checkfield.php
Disallow: /news/class.compiler.php
Disallow: /news/class.config.php
Disallow: /news/class.template.php
Disallow: /news/cloud.php
Disallow: /news/config.php
Disallow: /news/config.php.981
Disallow: /news/cvote.php
Disallow: /news/edit.php
Disallow: /news/editlink.php
Disallow: /news/end_gzip.php
Disallow: /news/favicon.ico
Disallow: /news/google-sitemap-rss.php
Disallow: /news/help.php
Disallow: /news/htaccess.default
Disallow: /news/index.under.construction.html
Disallow: /news/linkadmin.php
Disallow: /news/live.php
Disallow: /news/live2.php
Disallow: /news/live_comments.php
Disallow: /news/live_published.php
Disallow: /news/live_unpublished.php
Disallow: /news/local-antispam.txt
Disallow: /news/login.php
Disallow: /news/manage_banned_domains.php
Disallow: /news/module.php
Disallow: /news/out.php
Disallow: /news/pliggit.php
Disallow: /news/podcast.php
Disallow: /news/profile.php
Disallow: /news/query.log
Disallow: /news/recommend.php
Disallow: /news/register.php
Disallow: /news/search.php
Disallow: /news/settemplate.php
Disallow: /news/settings.php
Disallow: /news/settings.php.default
Disallow: /news/sidebar_comments.php
Disallow: /news/sidebar_stories.php
Disallow: /news/sidebar_stories_u.php
Disallow: /news/spamlog.log
Disallow: /news/submit.php
Disallow: /news/topusers.php
Disallow: /news/trackback.php
Disallow: /news/ts_image.php
Disallow: /news/user.php
Disallow: /news/user_add_remove_links.php
Disallow: /news/userrss.php
Disallow: /news/vote.php

[Andtony]

I've been using this little handy bit of code which I found from the forum months ago. Put it in your template's meta.tpl-file.

{if $indexit eq "1" OR $pagename eq "story"}
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
{else}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
{/if}

I'm using 9.7 but assume that it works on later versions too.

[sefs]

Hi, can you explain how this works....

Did you get it from here http://forums.pligg.com/suggestions/...e-content.html ?

They seem to have an extra bit of code that you have to add also.

Will what you have being added to the meta.tpl alone work? or will I have to add the additional snippet to the index.php as well

[Andtony]

Yep, I think that was the original thread. Thanks for finding it.

Just noticed that I gave you wrong code, that was the old code I was using before. This is what I'm using now and this method doesn't need that index.php modification mentioned on the original thread.

{if $pagename eq "published"" OR $pagename eq "story"}
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
{else}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
{/if}

Explanation:
This lets Google and other search engines to index the front page and story pages and prevents them indexing other pages. The code changes content of the robots-meta tag depending on which page is viewed. You can have more pages indexed by adding them to the if-statement I.E.
OR $pagename "upcoming".
You can see the code in action by viewing your site's source code after you have edited your meta.tpl.

[sefs]

Just a warning ... I think the way this is with published you are indexing all the paginated pages of index.php, what the other post was saying is only to index page one of the pagination (thats why he had the special code in his index page) but then as google hit that it would follow thru and index story pages only. so by changing the code to say publish if there were 100 pages in your pagination it would index each of those as well as the individual story pages on each of those. Is that what you wanted?

Originally Posted by Andtony

Yep, I think that was the original thread. Thanks for finding it.

Just noticed that I gave you wrong code, that was the old code I was using before. This is what I'm using now and this method doesn't need that index.php modification mentioned on the original thread.

{if $pagename eq "published"" OR $pagename eq "story"}
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
{else}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
{/if}

Explanation:
This lets Google and other search engines to index the front page and story pages and prevents them indexing other pages. The code changes content of the robots-meta tag depending on which page is viewed. You can have more pages indexed by adding them to the if-statement I.E.
OR $pagename "upcoming".
You can see the code in action by viewing your site's source code after you have edited your meta.tpl.

[swissbob2]

You can fix the pagination for tags quite easily.