Sharepoint: HTMLNOINDEX

[BedeFahey]

Hi Everyone,

I ran across this tag on a Sharepoint 2007 external facing site we're considering working on.

Has anyone ever seen it used?

NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOHTMLINDEX"/>

Obviously, <metaname="robots"content="noindex"> is your standard noindex tag, but I've never seen the above. I'm seeing references in Sharepoint discussions about it, and suspect it might be native to Sharepoint 2007, but I've never seen it in the wild before - Google doesn't appear to be respecting it either.

Thoughts?

[LesleyPaone]

Its kind of a weird tag in what it is and how it works. I am assuming you have used MS products before and noticed they have their own way of going about things. This is an old tag that MS wanted to be a noindex replacement for specifying single pages. It didn't really work out for them though, Google stuck to the standard and indexed the pages anyway. I am sure you can go a sitename: in Google and see the pages indexed that have that tag.

One thing I am not certain on, since the tag really isn't used much and hasn't been used in a while; is if Bing respects it. Commons sense would say that it does, but MS sometimes does not operate using common sense. So you might check that the site is indexed correctly in Bing.

[BedeFahey]

Thanks for the response Lesley!

You're right  about Microsoft having their own way of doing things. We're doing a lot of branding and design work for Sharepoint, and it's been an... let's just go with interesting... few years since we started offering it as a service.

Great thinking on checking the site in Bing -  Seems like common sense fails again: Bing is ignoring the tag too. Looking at our more recent projects in Sharepoint 2010 and 2013, the tag doesn't seem to exist at all, and there is no documentation on it. I can only assume that even Microsoft has dropped it at this point.

Thanks again for the help.

Bede