Instruct search engines not to index revision history for posts?
Googlebot is picking up a bunch of internal 404 links on my Askbot site. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that those links are found in old revisions of certain posts.
I have since edited those posts to fix the broken links, but of course they are permanently stored in the revision history, which means they will never disappear from search indexers!
I was going to suggest automatically adding rel="nofollow"
to links that appear in revision history, but the more I think about it, should post revision pages be indexed by search engines anyway? Maybe they should just be disallowed in robots.txt
.
For example, see revision 2 on http://expats.qa/questions/59/revisions/:
While investigating [how to start a business in Costa Rica][1], I opened communication with a Costa Rican law firm. ... [1]: /21/hiring-employees-and-managing-an-office-for-a-us/
Note that the link is incorrect; it should be /question/21/.../
, not /21/.../
.
Comments
Good point!