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Customer submitted bugs and feature requests
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A way to ask search engines not to index a particular notebook #326

Closed yurivish closed 2 years ago

yurivish commented 2 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Sometimes I want to publish a notebook on Observable and also elsewhere, but search engines downrate duplicate content.

For example I might write a posts for my personal site, and want to link to the Observable version as editable source code. Google picks up on the link, and indexes both versions.

Describe the solution you'd like

A checkbox in the publication settings to disallow indexing via a noindex meta tag in the header:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Describe alternatives you've considered

Unpublishing the notebook on Observable.

Additional context

Discussed on the Observable Slack on December 29.

mootari commented 2 years ago

What's missing here is that unlisted notebooks can end up in search engine results when they are linked to from other pages. I think it's reasonable to always serve unlisted notebooks with noindex.

mbostock commented 2 years ago

A fix will be live shortly.

yurivish commented 2 years ago

That's quick! Is the fix to serve unlisted notebooks with noindex, or does it cover the broader case of being able to control when a published notebook is indexed, e.g. if I wanted to fully publish a notebook on Observable (it would be listed in my profile), but host the "canonical" version on my own site?

mbostock commented 2 years ago

Unlisted notebooks will have noindex.

yurivish commented 2 years ago

Thank you!

I was thinking it'd be useful to have the ability to set noindex on fully published notebooks too, but feel free to keep this closed if that's not in the cards.

yurivish commented 2 years ago

I see the noindex header on my unlisted notebooks now — thanks again and happy 🎄!