Person application pages shouldn't be indexed if person hasn't used that app

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> <http://www.google.com/search?q=brad%20bollenbach>
>
> At the time of writing, in these results:
> * #1 is Brad's Launchpad page, which is fine
> * #2 is his Blueprints page, also fine
> * #3 and #4 are his Answers pages, but he's never used Answers
> * #5 is his Bugs page, which is fine
> * #8 is his Translations page, but he's never done any Translations
> * #9 is his Code page, but he's never registered any branches.
>
> So that people don't start loathing Launchpad results in search engines,
> a person's pages for each application should be set to not be indexed by
> search engines if that person has not actively used that application.

Also person application pages of invalid users should not be indexed
(eg. https://launchpad.net/~freak)

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden> http://www.canonical.com/
Canonical Ltd. http://www.ubuntu.com/

On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 07:44:47AM -0000, Stuart Bishop wrote:
> Also person application pages of invalid users should not be indexed
> (eg. https://launchpad.net/~freak)

We're already telling search engines not to index the overview page of
these placeholder profiles, and since this should be the only place with
links to their application pages, it seems to be enough (only for
placeholder profiles, though).

For instance, a search for

    Ben Guitreau site:launchpad.net

on google doesn't give any results.

In order to actually fix this bug, though, we need a higher level API which
tells, for which Launchpad application, whether or not the user has done any
work in it.

Actually, why do we want to allow search engines to index the application pages for a given person? They're only aggregators of things (related to that person) which are also visible in other pages (and thus indexed from there).

That may be appropriate for external search engines. For Launchpad's own site search, it would be less appropriate. I want to be able to search Launchpad for "salgado's bugs" and have the appropriate page directly in the search results (in Google right now, it's result #2 for that search string). So, this could be a problem if we use an external search engine to power Launchpad's site search.

I don't really believe in this bug. Working out which pages about Maris are the most important is google's job, not ours.

I agree this is not a bug, but if someone submitted a patch that provided <meta> tags that made the useless pages disappear from the results I would land it.