how to give user a choice for his profile to be search engine visibility or not

[vijdev]

how to give user a choice for his profile to be search engine visibility or no?

 

if a user ticks yes, then his profile should be avlbl to search engine results, if not it should be invisible to search engines.

how to do this?

[ignace]

Search engines only crawl pages they found on previous pages. If a user doesn't want his profile to be shown on SE then just don't link to it (or add a rel="nofollow").

[isedeasy]

Search engines only crawl pages they found on previous pages. If a user doesn't want his profile to be shown on SE then just don't link to it (or add a rel="nofollow").

 

What would stop others linking to it?

 

You could try adding

 

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

 

To the profiles that you don't want indexed.

[vijdev]

thanks guys...are these fool-proof methods?...and will they work in all conditions?

[mrMarcus]

thanks guys...are these fool-proof methods?...and will they work in all conditions?

 

it will work for search engines that follow a "noindex" attribute.

 

and what do you mean by "fool-proof"?

[WeirdMystery]

thanks guys...are these fool-proof methods?...and will they work in all conditions?

 

What do you mean by "fool-proof". If the page is linked to another page, the crawler can crawl and index it if it wants to, however, you are saying on your page "Please do not index my page".

 

They can crawl and index your site, by adding the tag, you are asking them not to.

[vijdev]

well, i mean can there be conditions when this method can fail?

@mr marcus....you say it works only if the crawler follows the noindex attribute!...so how to go abt. getting the better of it even if it doesnt follow!

[WeirdMystery]

well, i mean can there be conditions when this method can fail?

@mr marcus....you say it works only if the crawler follows the noindex attribute!...so how to go abt. getting the better of it even if it doesnt follow!

 

No, it will not fail unless you do not put the tag in the correct place.

 

All Crawlers look for this tag.

[mrMarcus]

All Crawlers look for this tag.

 

that's a pretty bold statement.  however, it's false.

 

Standards-compliant web crawlers will follow this meta tag, and even then some of the major search engines still show a url reference plus a link to a cached version of the page (if available).

 

and of course you have malicious crawlers that couldn't care less of the meta tags you have on your site.  They fall under the "All Crawlers" category, don't they?

 

My advice, add those standard tags at least, and read the documentation regarding each search engine on how to prevent pages from being indexed and then what to do if some pages have been indexed and how to remove them.