Launchpad itself

Every bug comment has its own entry in Google

Bug #92404 reported by Matthew Paul Thomas
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Invalid
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Google (and presumably other search engines) records every bug comment as being a separate page, which causes a lot of result spam if you search for something that happens to be mentioned in Launchpad.

The individual comment pages should either not exist (with their URLs redirecting to the main bug page), or at least be set to not be indexed by search engines.

Tags: lp-bugs
Revision history for this message
James Henstridge (jamesh) wrote :

Note that in the case of long comments, there is content that may appear only on the comment's own page (it gets truncated on the bug's page).

Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

Should we just rel="nofollow" these links then?

Revision history for this message
Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe) wrote :

That's no good for the links that are already out there. Ideally these links should be in their own "namespace" so that robots can be told to ignore them with an appropriate robots.txt rule. It would also be good if bugs were only indexed with their a single canoconical URI...

Revision history for this message
Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe) wrote :

(if you don't want to go down the robots.txt route I guess you could set the appropriate X-Robots-Tag HTTP header in pages but this seems like more work than robots.txt).

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

Adding <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> would be both less work and less brittle.

Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)
Changed in malone:
status: New → Confirmed
Curtis Hovey (sinzui)
Changed in malone:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Martin Pool (mbp) wrote :

I think this has now essentially been fixed by Google detecting and handling this case in a site-independent way: I no longer see multiple entries for comments when I search for bug titles.

Given jamesh's comment #1 that it's pretty useful that robots can match the comment pages if they want to, I don't think making any change in lp makes sense.

If you can still reproduce a problem, please give an example.

Changed in launchpad:
status: Triaged → Invalid
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