Members profiles found on Google search..

Hi,

We want our members to be private.. Currently we are finding that our members profiles are being found on Googl esearch.. Is there a way to block membership profile pages from being scanned and found by Google? But still allow h emain pages to be optimized and found on Google?

Create a robots.txt file in the root of your dolphin site. In that file put the following.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /profile.php

I tried this and it did not seem to work.. Is there any other advice or method to ensure members profiles are not found on Google search?

Ok. You can also do this instead which should be better than the robots file.

Edit the file profiles.php that is in the root of your dolphin site.

Look for this line of code.

$oSysTemplate->addJs('view_edit.js');

Add this line under it.

$oSysTemplate->addInjection('injection_head', 'text', '<meta name="robots" content="noindex">');


Thats it.

What that will do is add the noindex meta tag to the profile pages which will prevent that page from being indexed.



Note: This method and the other method i mentioned only prevents google and other search engines from indexing the page. It does not remove any existing listings. Those get removed over time as the search engines revisit them and discover it's not suppose to be indexed and will eventually remove it. Which will take time. To force a removal of indexed pages you will need to use Google Webmaster Tools to request links be removed from the index.

Also note: Because this is a source change, you will need to check after every dolphin upgrade to a new version to make sure the change is still there and reapply if needed as you would for any other dolphin source change.

I think changing the robots.txt file works primarily for future content. Maybe it works for current content after google rescans each affected page but I don't think that there is any guarantee of that.  You need to submit the URLs to google via webmaster tools for immediate removal. 

I've had great success using google's webmaster tools delete URL feature combined with a Chome extension someone created that automates URL deletion by reading a text file of each URL you want to delete.  It's called something like webmaster tools bulk URL removal.

Deano, thanks for the core code mod above and the robots.txt info.

Robots.txt is a handy way to reduce duplicate content on Dolphin (or any other platform) sites.

If one wants to cut down on the duplicated content on the site then add the file or directory to the robots.txt file as per Deano's pattern above and, over time, the unwanted pages will remove themselves from SERPS and you should start to see in increase in ranking for the better focused, unduplicated pages that remain.

pmarinac, I will check out your suggestions for bulk removal of pages as the process does take quite a while without a shove from the webmaster. ;)

Thanks,

Andrew.

[EDIT] Here is the link to the Chrome extension pmarinac mentioned: http://packershack.com/blog/bulk-url-removal-google-webmaster-tools