DigitalNZ leeching google rank from contributors

[Stuart A. Yeates]

Hello

This is an email expanding on a point I made at the DNZ day last
weekend [great day, by the way].

The attached screen shot is a google search for "ture pooti"
("Electoral Law" in Maori). NZETC and papers past are the only
significant publishers using this term. Notice that the first links in
the search are to the NZETC (which is great) but three of the next
four next links are into DigitalNZ / Matapihi search results which
feature NZETC documents in the search results.

This is a problem because:
(a) these fragments of our documents which DigitalNZ / Matapihi are
serving to google are diluting the uniqueness of NZETC in the eyes of
google (and presumably other search engines).
(b) DigitalNZ / Matapihi (which have no relevant content) are more
highly rated than papers past (which does have relevant content, fab.
content). This is misleading to users.

I would like DigitalNZ / Matapihi to do is to add to their robot
exclusion rules every page which includes search results. Looking at
http://search.digitalnz.org/robots.txt it seems clear that in an
earlier incarnation this has been considered and understood, but the
website has moved on and the robot exclusion has not.

cheers
stuart

[Andy Neale]

Hi Stuart,

Thanks for that, we'll look into what to do here for DigitalNZ, and also pass to Matapihi. I think what's happening here is that the custom search tools are being indexed as valid destinations. The History and Heritage links for example are part of:

http://search.digitalnz.org/en/historyandheritage

We can't move on this immediately but will dig a little deeper once the mix and mash competition is sorted.

Cheers,
Andy

>>> "Stuart A. Yeates" <sye...@gmail.com> 25/10/2010 10:12 p.m. >>>