At 09:16 AM 3/9/00 +0000, Brian Kelly wrote: >Yes, so my question is "is it possible to remove a page from a search >engines view of the web, without removing the resource?"
Use /robots.txt or the robots meta tag. On the next visit to the page, the robot should remove it from the index. Then notify the robots of changed content. We have several users who roll the website then send a few thousand notifications to their own search engine, or who send a notification for every new/changed news story. >To give an example, a company's annual report is published >(http://www.acme.com/annual-report-1999/) and submitted to several >search engines. The following year the report is unlinked from the main >area, but linked from an archive area. The company wishes to remove the >report from search engines. Can this be done - in a more elegant >fashion that going to every search engine and submitted a load of >unsubmit requests? Ah, this is a different question. Your Uniform Resource Locator stayed the same, but the resource changed. Hmm. Your best bet is to use URLs that really name the item and good titles, so that the search results are clear to the user. So a title of "eTulip.com 1999 Annual Report" is much better than "eTulip.com Annual Report". A redirect located at annual-report-current would be a good solution for directing users to this year's report. And don't be too quick to remove items. A friend of mine does research at Harvard Business School, and she'd be delighted to read some of those old annual reports if she could find them. >What effect does having a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> element >have for a resource which has already been indexed? Some robots might forget the URL the first time they see noindex. Those that do revisit (Ultraseek Server will) should obey whatever is in the tag this time. wunder -- Walter R. Underwood Senior Staff Engineer Infoseek Software GO Network, part of The Walt Disney Company [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product) http://www.best.com/~wunder/ 1-408-543-6946
