John Webb wrote:

I am still confused about the source of the Meta Tag META NAME=robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow" . Our archive indexes have the "noindex,follow" tag, but the pages for each message have "index, nofollow". We want our archives to be available for unrestricted spidering and indexing throughout all of the pages. What do we need to do to enable the correct tag in our html? What exactly does the follow or nofollow part of it do?

The tags that are there are the appropriate ones. Brad Rogers has explained (no)follow, but the idea is that when searching for keywords, you don't want to hit words in subjects on the index pages; you want to hit the posts themselves, so the index pages have noindex,follow to not index that page but to follow the links to the actual posts. The posts themselves have index,nofollow so that they are indexed, but links within them to other posts or to external sites are not followed.

If you feel these are not appropriate, you can always change or remove them by editing the archidxhead.html, archtoc.html, archtocnombox.html and article.html templates <http://wiki.list.org/x/jYA9>.

On a different topic.... I see several threads and methods concerning the use of search engines for searching the archives. What would be the most simple way for us to add a way for users to search for keywords in our archives?

The following form will submit a Google search for the entered words restricted to the public archive for LISTNAME at the site lists.example.com

<form action="http://www.google.com/search"> <input name=q type=hidden value="site:lists.example.com"> <input name=q type=hidden value="inurl:pipermail/LISTNAME"> <input maxlength=2048 name=q size=20 title="Google Search" value=""> <input name=btnG type=submit value="Search"> </form>

This could be added to the appropriate templates, e.g. archidxhead.html, archtoc.html and archtocnombox.html.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan