Is there any easy way to set the noindex meta-tag in the HEAD of certain albums and album sets?
Not finding any reference to it in the docs
you could probably do this using the head hook in phplugins.
Daniel has a post about targeting specific pages for a phplugins function:
https://lab.danielleu.com/blog/page-specific-php-code/
A more reliable means is to implement a robots.txt file at the root of your site. Search engines are free to ignore meta tags.
I’ve actually been experimenting with robots.txt lately to see whether I can come up with a best practices for robots.txt and SEO in Backlight.
robots.txt is what I have been doing. One difference seems to be that if someone else links to something on your site and their site is an indexed site, your site will show up as a search result. But if noindex is in the header, Google will then remove it. Unless there is a robots.txt.
Typical google catch-22 there. I was thinking robots.txt for the album set pages for private areas, then noindex in the albums themselves in case a client linked to it.
Presumably, if the album is protected by a passcode, a web crawler could not see into it anyway. But still. Can you be too paranoid? (also, my practice has been to only passcode protect the album set, but not the albums within. I’m rethinking that)
Thanks for the reference link. I’ll think about whether there’s anything useful we can do with it. I hadn’t much considered external sites linking to content.
I hadn’t either until I ran across it.
Seems like it might be a nice checkbox to have in the design section.
Thanks for considering!