[thesite] request for google blocking meta tag in archive post

Richard Bennett richard.bennett at skynet.be
Fri Feb 7 17:53:01 CST 2003


Hi,
<----- Original Message -----
<From: "William Anderson" <neuro at well.com>
<I forwarded it to the content administration list (email
<admin at lists.evolt.org for this sort of thing) as I'm on that list,

Thanks for forwarding it to the correct place.

<but I
<think the current consensus is to not action this, as it affects a lot of
<posts, not just yours.

Well, I agree a manual change would be a headache, but I guess these
archives are being pulled from a database, so wouldn't it be possible to add
a flag, whether or not the "nocache" meta tag should be added, and allow
posters to add the keyword <nocache> to their posts, to trigger this switch?
If nothing is done about this, there is a real problem.
It is suggested that site-checks be requested by putting "site check <URL>"
in the title.
Site checks are typically for new sites, just being launched.
It takes at least around 3 to 6 months for a new site to get a really good
Pagerank(tm) from Google.
evolt.org has a pagerank of 8/10 - there are very few sites that will ever
get such a high rank, so evolt's result will often show very high in the
listings.
So a webmaster asks for a site-check on evolt - naturally he has to post the
URL - and the webmaster's client sees the (sometimes negative) site crits
showing up close to their own site on Google, for a very long time,
discrediting the webmaster.

<My personal suggestion is to modify your companies
<site to more effectively be ranked by Google.
Naturally that's one of the things we try anyway, but beating a page-rank of
8/10 is pretty hard.

Let's see how this is affecting people:
<
http://google.com/search?q=allintitle:+%2Bwww++%22thelist+Site%22&num=100&as
_qdr=y&filter=0 >

That's a list of some sites requesting a site check on thelist.
So taking the (company) name from the URL, we see how these sites rank
compared to evolt's archive of their site check:

http://google.com/search?q=stemofficial
http://google.com/search?q=coeville
http://google.com/search?q=magisnetworks
http://google.com/search?q=rapidfiregames
http://google.com/search?q=GamingSA
http://google.com/search?q=chadsavage
http://google.com/search?q=prettyhipprogramming
http://google.com/search?q=rci-nv
http://google.com/search?q=dittodesign
http://google.com/search?q=kfx-design
http://google.com/search?q=hugobia
http://google.com/search?q=stimilon
http://google.com/search?q=brendonbarton

Those are the first I tried, and everywhere the evolt site-check shows up on
the first page.
Often these site-checks contain some pretty damming critiques, about issues
that have probably been resolved on the sites, but the critiques will follow
the site for ever.

Either there should be an effective nocache alternative available, or list
users should be repeatedly warned about these issues.

Please forward this to the appropriate list,

Thanks,
R i c h a r d















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