Google Search Console started sending me error reports about some Discourse pages. URL is on Google, but has issues It can appear in Google Search results (if not subject to a manual action or removal request). However, some issues prevent it from being eligible for all enhancements. [Learn more (URL Inspection tool - Search Console Help) My forum’s welcome page is one of the pages that they complain about – it refers to user pages (e.g. this one) that are “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”. I am using the normal Docker-based Discourse setup – it’s behind nginx for SSL purposes. Any ideas what’s happening here? I’ve upgraded Discourse and set an additional test in the search console, but the problem still persists.

I guess, if it gets people to stop bugging us about it. It makes no difference in practice other than reducing the nagging.

Or we could put useful content on the search engine / text browser view of user pages, like links to your top replies and top topics :slight_smile:

hmmm … no… we purposely do not want to index user pages. besides the spam factor what kind of value does this provide.

People on here keep asking for MORE SEO JUICE and INTERLINKING every so often and I honestly can’t think of anything better along those lines than linking to the most-liked posts + recent posts you’ve made. Also, a forum user page is a valid search result for someone who wants to see your recent posts. To put it another way: from Google’s perspective, internal links out of user pages are a pretty great page rank signal and this is them saying “hey it would be nice if you could let us use these”

We did the “please index the user page” conversation so many times though… in fact, to be honest, I think even mentioning this automatically raises the blood temperature in Jeff’s head automatically by 10 degrees. Let’s keep this focused on just properly excluding the user page so we can stop dealing with … “oh you excluded the user page but did not exclude it for realz complaint”.

[image] sam: mentioning this automatically raises the blood temperature in Jeff’s head automatically by 10 degrees. It raised mine by more than a few mm Hg As someone that has been a moderator for several years and seen countless examples of what I call “profile spam” I beg, please no. To this day there are a large number of account registrations every day, the members reading no posts, making no posts, but populating their profile to advertise a business. And this with profiles that are only visible to other registered members. I can only imagine this would become even more of a problem than it already is if they became indexable. True, there might be some value in exposing links to posts to search engines, but they are already exposed elsewhere and don’t need to be also exposed from profile pages. EDIT trust level 2 and above could work. By the time a member makes it to trust level 2 they can be, ermm, more trustworthy.

I do like the idea of allowing this to TL2, agree it is consistent with the nofollow stuff.

If you are adding the per-page tag it is almost the same code anyway, and we’d need to remove the robots.txt user path block anyhow.

Using the noindex tag is the right thing anyway, as far as I understand: The discussion is about whether we want Google to index the user pages, but robots.txt does not prevent indexing: You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results. This is because other pages might point to your page, and your page could get indexed that way, avoiding the robots.txt file. I think this is what the message posted by @metakermit is hinting at: Google is complaining that it has indexed some pages it couldn’t retrieve, so the index entries are not really good entries. Because of this, I think letting Google crawl these pages, with links to the users most relevant posts, is definitely a good thing: It helps search engines discover content and better understand which content is the most relevant. Whether we want user pages to be listed in the index is a separate decision, and I agree that the two reasonable options are not at all or just for trusted users.

Google complaining – Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) September 6, 2018, 6:38am 9

Hmm we could make it so TL2 and higher get indexed user pages @sam. That would be consistent with nofollow rules in posts too.

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Google complaining – Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt

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