Robots exclusion

[Horizon]

Hi All,

I have an issue whereby print versions of my articles are being flagged up as "duplicate" content / page titles.

In order to get around this, I feel that the easiest way is to just add them to my robots.txt document with a disallow. Here is my URL make up:

Normal article: www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345

Print version of my article www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345&printversion=yes

I know that having dynamic parameters in my URL is not best practise to say the least, but I'm stuck with this for the time being... My question is, how do I add just the print versions of articles to my robots file without disallowing articles too? Can I just add the parameter to the document like so?

Disallow: &printversion=yes

I also know that I can do add a meta noindex, nofollow tag into the head of my print versions, but I feel a robots.txt disallow will be somewhat easier...

Many thanks in advance.

Matt

[RyanKent]

I also know that I can do add a meta noindex, nofollow tag into the head of my print versions, but I feel a robots.txt disallow will be somewhat easier...

A simple rule of SEO. Never ever ever use your robots.txt file to block a page unless there is no other reasonable means of blocking the page.

Use the "noindex" meta tag on your print pages. Do not use the "noindex, nofollow" tag as you are then telling search engines not to trust links to your own site which is a bad move.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Matt,

I would agree 100% with Ryan's comments on robots.txt.

In addition to this, it is a notoriously unreliable method for blocking...if the crawler happens to come to your site via an external link to any page other than the home page it will not see robots.txt.

Sha.