MyBB Community Forums

Full Version: NoIndex Archive Pages
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
A couple of questions: 

1. Google has index 6000+ of my archive pages. Acc to my analytics reports , they don't bring any organic traffic, they are unnecessarily cluttering index, so I wanted to include "noindex" directive to it. 

I use Google SEO plugin for mybb which has added various meta options including canonical tags but somehow archive page are also showing <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /> 

As far as I know, this setting is not coming from google seo plugin.

I am not able to find the place where these meta tags are coming from. 

Here is an example page  - view-source:http://www.learnqtp.com/forums/archive/index.php?thread-8737.html 

2. I remember installing meta-tags plugin long back on my forums. Though I have installed it some time back but still its setttings are showing in my ACP. I have checked my inc/plugin folder but there is no file related to meta-tags plugin. 

Can you please help? In case you need any more info, please let me know.
Correct, Google SEO plugin does not place that tag, but it may have an option to noindex it, don't recall.

However, you can edit the file inc/functions_archive.php

to remove or edit that meta directive
Thanks #1 solved.

Can you help with #2 as well?

Also , I would like to nofollow all external links but follow all internal links and some sites that I prefer. What is the best way to do this?
I tried searching for solutions , either I get outdated plugins or buggy code.
What are the settings that are showing in the ACP?

How is a plugin going to distinguish between links that you prefer and those you don't? Google SEO has an option to nofollow links, not sure if those include internal links as well.
If you don't want the archive mode at all, you could remove the archive/ dir altogether from your webspace and remove all links to it from your templates. You could also add a hard redirect to the full version in your .htaccess. If you want to keep the archive mode but not let Google index it at all, you could block it in robots.txt.

The canonical tag is just a hint for Google; it might not follow this hint right away, it might take long to re-visit previously indexed archive pages, it also depends on whether Google decided to index the canonical page at all.

As for settings of uninstalled plugins: sometimes plugins fail to clean up properly on uninstall. You can remove setting groups manually in the admin cp.