Don't spider print friendly pages?

Newbie Joined: Nov 26, 2007 Posts: 22

This might be best asked in the ravennuke forum, but I ask here because I believe my "issue" lies in using shortlinks (rather static html pages.)

My Ravennuke content (with shortlinks enabled) has the "Printer Friendly" link enabled, but google is indexing my printer pages. If one googles a search term, it's possible to go straight to the printer friendly page, which I don't want as they don't have a way to navigate through the site, which is the whole intention.

My first thought was to add "Disallow: /modules/news/print.php" to my robots.txt file, but the fact that's it has already generated a static html page prior to crawling makes me think that won't work.

So, after all that - my question is - is there a way to prevent google (and other legit search engines) from crawling the print friendly pages?

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 926

Actually, this really is not a ShortLinks issue. There are two ways to handle this, one is to change the links to the print page to have a "nofollow" attribute. However, I prefer the following in this case as it should work coming from anywhere:

=== OPEN FILE ===

modules/News/print.php

=== ADD ===

To the PrintPage function code the following meta tag between the <head> tag and the <body> tag:

Code:

or you could use:

Code:

=== DONE ===

This should keep the search engines from indexing these pages as well as from following any links on these pages.

Newbie Joined: Nov 26, 2007 Posts: 22

That's exactly what I needed. Never dawned on me to place it within the html output of the page.

Thanks!

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 926

Hey, glad that worked!

Spam Stopper - Comments Modules · Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 297

Wow, good one!
This has me thinking about "substantially duplicated content" all over again.