You should already know that here at WPW there are high competent
SEO professionals, a lot of beginneror intermediate level knowledge members.
What makes WPW a powerfull
SEO Community? If all members no matter of which knowledge level will unite, I can't believe that exists out there an
SEO professional how can compete us.
What I am after? Well ... optimize WPW? Just kidding. Well... if they need help, we sure can give a hand.
Before I come to my point, first I would like to make something clear:
I do not want any "thank you for great information", or any of those filthy and annoying posts of members who are trying to draw the attention of the thread subscribers to their signature, selling laptop batteries, or what ever else...
If my condition will be violated, and the mods will not take action, I will leave the thread imediatelly.
Now here I want to bring up a very interesting topic, that everyone will be thankful with the come out. So please don't go off-topic.
Please take some minutes and watch the video below:
YouTube - Matt Cutts Discusses Webmaster Tools
Notice: I will add the link of this thread at Youtube as a comment inviting Matt to come over if he has time.
So I have two points I would love to ask Matt.
1. He said that one of the best solutions (with a smiley) is to protect areas via .htaccess password protected area.
My concerns:
The IBM patent explores dangling nodes in depth, and provides a list of pages that may be treated by search engines as dangling nodes. And one of them is:
- If the page requires authentication.
What happens when a without a nofollow attribute or masked client/server side link is pointing to the protected area directory?
2. He mentioned the use of the noindex meta tag, but that is not the best solution. I am affraid that I have to disagree there. I will explain later on why.
My concerns:
a. Why didn't he mention the noindex robots.txt directive? Because it is unofficially supported?
b. If I disallow through my robots.txt a protected area with a htpasswd via .htaccess, I have a dangling/node issue, or?
Wouldn't noindex via robots.txt be better alternative? I am still thinking about it...
What's next?
Shoot your thoughts!