NotIndexed

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MeatballWiki has a very high PageRank, and thus it often appears high on the list of pages that Google returns for even search results not related to our core competency. We have a had a lot of pedophiles roll through Meatball, and that's pretty disgusting. More than that, it has caught a lot of spammers who want to attract pedophiles. Two pages that caught a lot of unwanted attention were AdultCheck and NaturistClub.

We deleted AdultCheck, but that's only from our perspective. From Google's, it still sees a valid HTML page, and thus thinks the page still exists. We were continuously spammed and vandalized, and continuously re-deleting that page while it appeared in the #2 position in the Google search for "adultcheck". To solve this problem, the script now emits a MetaTag to tell Google not to index any nonexistent page. This also helped remove the highly popular BableFish from our site finally, which also brought in a number of vandals.

Specifically, the script now emits the line

: <META NAME='robots' CONTENT='noindex,nocache,noarchive,nofollow'>

However, this does not solve the problem for existing, content-full pages like NaturistClub. One solution would be to remove the site entirely from the Google index, something proposed on LimitGrowth. However, it seems that Google searching is the driving vehicle behind Meatball's current growth at the moment. Unless we plan to start door-to-door (community-to-community) selling once again, we should keep ourselves under Google's Eye.

Further, it would violate the MeatballMission to be supportive to other communities. If people cannot find our material, it is of very little use to them.

Another solution would be to delete the offending pages, but that would seem like a loss. Why cow to jerks?

A better solution might be to deny to Google just those pages that will attract problems. Sure, those looking for a salient opinion on naturists will be out of luck, but that's a trade off we might want to make.

Therefore, rather than retreating, NotIndexed is a proposed WikiBadge? for specific pages that we want to exclude from the Google search. Pages that contain the tag NotIndexed will emit the MetaTag as mentioned above.

But, It's not really clear whether we're just keeping pedophiles from searching the site (maybe not a very big deal?), or spammers from finding it. We could analyze the logs in more depth to find out, but that would take a long time, and there are privacy concerns of course.

It's also not clear what other pages this might apply to. DeletedPage is a good candidate, even in BrainstormMode (don't link to a temporary URI). Perhaps people will want to exclude their homepages? (Should CategoryHomePage also do the same thing?) And like all WikiBadge?s, it does not allow LinkingWithoutIndexing (ironically!).

NotIndexed

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