DotNetNuke Tutorials and Articles

If you are like me, you are constantly paying attention to Google Analytics and the search engine placement of your articles and content.

During a recent Google search expedition, I noticed that the print pages of my articles produced with the Ventrian News Article module were being linked on Google and not my article detail pages.

Since a print page does not have menu navigation, readers could not navigate the rest of the site.

My wife Mara and I share common articles on her better living and gardening tips site, MaraKknows.com and my outdoor recreational site, JustNorth Outdoors.

Here is an example of Google search results:

I was able to correct the situation and have Google index the correct article detail pages by adding a line to Mara's robots.txt file.

What on Earth is a robots.txt File?

A robots.txt is a file placed on your server to tell the various search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. You can use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.

The file itself is a simple text file, which can be created in Notepad. It need to be saved to the root directory of your site, that is the directory where your home page or index page is.

By adding the following line to Mara's robots.txt file:

Disallow: /DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Print.aspx

It prevents the Google robots from indexing the print page and Google should begin indexing the correct pages.

Here is an example of a robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /language/language/
Disallow: /desktopmodules/
Disallow: /Terms.aspx
Disallow: /Privacy.aspx
Disallow: /*/ctl/
Disallow: /Host/
Disallow: /Admin/
Disallow: /Portals/1/Logs/
Disallow: /App_Browser/
Disallow: /App_Code/
Disallow: /App_Data/
Disallow: /App_GlobalResources/
Disallow: /HttpModules/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /Components/
Disallow: /Config/
Disallow: /Controls/
Disallow: /Documentation/
Disallow: /DesktopModules/
Disallow: /Providers/
Disallow: /Install/
Disallow: /Resources/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /Portals/
Disallow: /DesktopModules/PropertyAgent/Print.aspx
Disallow: /DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Print.aspx

Sitemap: http://maraknows.com/SiteMap.aspx
Sitemap: http://maraknows.com/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles
/Rss.aspx?TabID=56&ModuleID=379
Sitemap: http://maraknows.com/portals/0/MaraKnowsQuickTips.xml

Another method to avoid the search robots from indexing the print page is to add a meta tag to the header of the /DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Print.aspx page.

Example:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Indicates that a robot should neither index a document, nor analyze it for links.

Wishing you success,
Buck Anderson
DNN Professor

DNNprofessor.com
http://twitter.com/DNNprofessor