Craigslist.org doesn't want their pages indexed? Theory?

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by lakelandprinting, Apr 23, 2009.

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  1. #1
    I'm sure we've all been on Craigslist and seen all of the spam on there. When nofollows first came out they were one of the first to use them.

    I noticed something the other day while looking at a used car listing in Lakeland Florida. I always look up at my SEO Quake extension to see what external links are followed, and sure enough there was no nofollow link.

    I dug a bit deeper and viewed their source and found they are telling the search engines not to bother indexing the page:

    <meta name="robots" content="NOARCHIVE,NOFOLLOW" <link rel="stylesheet" title="craigslist" href="http://www.craigslist.org/styles/craigslist.css" type="text/css" media="all">

    Now, what benefit would they get from this? They used to show up on long tail keyword searches alot, but obviously not now.

    I'm trying to see the logic here? Does anyone have a clue on how this would benefit them rather than hurt them?
     
    lakelandprinting, Apr 23, 2009 IP
  2. TG2006

    TG2006 Guest

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    #2
    Maybe its to try and help reduce spam.
     
    TG2006, Apr 23, 2009 IP
  3. vansterdam

    vansterdam Notable Member

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    #3
    Yes I'm sure craigslist deals with an extremely high amount of spam. The nofollow meta tag is likely an attempt to limit the amount of spam. Craigslist has never been too concerned with becoming as huge and successful as possible. They are quite content to just provide a great service and make a decent living.
     
    vansterdam, Apr 23, 2009 IP
  4. dofollowking

    dofollowking Peon

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    #4
    everyone one spams. This is just a way they combat it and how google chooses to index their site. Google has their own team of manual reviewing engineers to deal with large sites like craigslist.
     
    dofollowking, Apr 23, 2009 IP
  5. mmerlinn

    mmerlinn Prominent Member

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    #5
    Quite simple really. Craigslist pages expire in relatively short times, so to avoid loads on their servers with people looking for non-existent pages, they would naturally discourage indexing. Like why would anyone want to index pages that disappear shortly after they are indexed???
     
    mmerlinn, Apr 24, 2009 IP
  6. Canonical

    Canonical Well-Known Member

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    #6

    That <meta> robots element does NOT prevent that page from being indexed... The page is available for being indexed. They would have placed NOINDEX in the <meta> robots element if they did not want it indexed.

    The NOARCHIVE tells Google not to make a cached copy of the page available in the index (hides the Cached hyperlink next to the SERP listing). It also prevents the Wayback Machine from archiving a copy of the page.

    The NOFOLLOW tells Google and the other engines NOT to pass Page Rank to any of the outbound links from that page. Google will not crawl those links. The pages pointed to by the links can still be discovered, crawled , indexed by following other links to those sames pages but they won't discover, crawl, index them because of the links on the craigslist page.

    Perhaps reading this Guide to Using the Robots Meta Element might clear things up.
     
    Canonical, Apr 24, 2009 IP