Reduce external search indexing of request list pages

[garethrees]

The main things we want indexed are record pages themselves (info request pages, user pages, authority pages, etc).

Snippets of request content often appear on list pages, and create a whack-a-mole situation when unhappy users find that external search engines have indexed a list page (e.g. /body/foo?page=12) that contains a cached snippet of PII that we've removed from the request page itself.

We should stop indexing of:

• [x] Request list pages (/list/all, /list/successful, etc) with a page= query param
• [x] Similar requests page (/request/:url_title/similar)
• [x] Body pages with a page= query param (/body/:url_name?page=N)
• [x] User pages with a page= query param (/user/:url_name?page=N)
• [x] User "wall" page (/user/:url_name/wall)

We might be able to do this via robots.txt, or could set via the X-Robots-Tag header depending on the page number:

before_action :set_no_crawl_headers, if: -> { params[:page].to_i > 1 }

[garethrees]

🤔 Similar requests should already be disallowed for indexing https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/0.44.0.0/public/robots.txt#L19

[HelenWDTK]

It's not/similar/ it's /similar?page=4&utm_campaign=alaveteli-experiments-87&utm_content=sidebar_similar_requests&utm_medium=link&utm_source=whatdotheyknow

[garethrees]

The * should include anything after */similar/* – I can see the issue though; should be */similar*

[HelenWDTK]

Only if there is a / after the similar. See google (search /fish/ https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/robots_txt)

[garethrees]

Might as well cover the actions noted in https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/8216 as part of this since it seems pretty easy to do:

• [ ] The annotation page (/request/SLUG/annotate)
• [ ] The similar requests page (/request/SLUG/similar)
• [ ] Any links that always require a sign-in (reply, report, status update, request ZIP download)