(A slightly different version of this message was cross-posted to LSTSRV-L
yesterday.)

>
>I wonder if switching the archives of your ACCOUNTABILITY list to
>private would prevent it from being included in Google's search
>results.

Yes, this will work as designed.  Since Private archives require a password
for access, Google's crawler won't be able to enter them.  There is a
solution for Public archives, though.  It involves the use of META tags
within the HTML code, which Owners can access through their list's web
templates.

You can control compliant crawler behaviour (such as Google's) at the
individual page level by using a META tag.  Note that I specify 'compliant
crawlers'....some crawlers are non-compliant and won't respect the tags.
You need to insert the tag between the page's HEAD tags in the HTML code
itself and looks something like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex;nofollow">

The parameter 'noindex' tells a compliant crawler to not index the page,
'nofollow' tells it to not follow any hyperlinks off of that page; they can
be used either individually or in combination.

For a list that has Public archives you can insert this tag into the HTML
by editing the WWW_INDEX template, which is found in each list's Template
Management area of the web interface or in the listname.mailtpl.  WWW_INDEX
is used to build the list's first page, which is also referenced from the
Server Archives page and should help to restrict crawling of the archives.
Two points to note are that this will work with compliant crawlers only (as
noted above) and it won't protect pages further into the archives since
it's only added to the listname.index page.

Site Admins who need to implement something like this across the entire
server are welcome to look up the original post in LSTSRV-L
<http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0405&L=lstsrv-l&T=0&F=&S=&
P=4408>.

--
Regards,
 Michael Shannon
 Senior Consultant, Asia Pacific Region           [log in to unmask]
 L-Soft international, Inc.                     http://www.lsoft.com

 Chazzozz!!

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