[syslinux] About the google-invisibility of this list

[Gene Cumm]

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Thomas Schmitt <scdbackup at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i wondered why our happy bug hunt about the uninitialized
> register did not pop up in Google during a search for
> recent mentionings of xorriso.
> Wasn't there a thread about google-invisibility a few months
> ago ?
>
> So i began to watch and made an experiment.
>
> Can it be that this HTML tag
>   META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow"
> in
>   http://www.syslinux.org/archives/2013-November/thread.html
> and
>   http://www.syslinux.org/archives/
> is to blame ?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
> When i tried with the quite unique search text
> "Sysinux 6 will not boot", i only got to a search engine
> (or whatever) called "marshut".
> Not a single link to a message in www.syslinux.org/archives.
> The same for the title texts of the other longish threads of
> november 2013.
>
> The source of 2013-November/thread.html looks not overly
> repelling for search robots.
> HTML ... HEAD ... META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow"
> should lead them to the messages.
>
> Nevertheless this seems not to be usual in mailing list archives.
> So i made an experiment:
>   http://scdbackup.webframe.org/syslinux_2013_11.html
> is a copy of 2013-November/thread.html, just missing that tag.
> I placed a link to it at a fewly visited corner of the web
> and began to watch daily. This was 8 days ago.
>
> Three days ago, "Sysinux 6 will not boot" showed up by three
> links to the syslinux.org archive. This was probably due to
> info spreading in the Archlinux community.
>
> Today, my lure page showed up for the first time. It is the
> only match to "Syslinux November 2013" (with quotation marks).
> And suddenly i get a handful of matches for each of the longer
> threads in november 2013.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
> Maybe just a random incident ...
>
> But i think it is worth a try to remove the META NAME="robots"
> tag from the Year-Month/thread.html pages, and best from
>   http://www.syslinux.org/archives/
> too.

That's interesting to say the least.  I'm curious if that's what
Google's WebMaster tools report
(https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/?hl=en ).

hpa, I'd be willing to look at this.

-- 
-Gene