4 replies to this topic

[DJKay]

Across our knowledgebase, they are replete duplicate title tags because there is a separate page that is being spun out that is just for printing. Example from web master tools:

"This is a sample of the title tag listed in web master tools"
/article.cfm?id=1763
/article_printable.cfm?1763

I thought that best practice is you have a css style sheet that lays out the page for printing [I am sure I could have worded this better or said it more correctly], so you would not be generating a whole new page. As you know, in cases where there would be things like a secondary version of page, best practice is to exclude the page in the robots.txt. Example: you have a press release in html; and the pdf version of it would be put in a folder that is disallowed on the robots.txt so it would not be crawled.

Is the answer to this to update the robots.txt file with all the printable versions of pages for each knowledgebase? These article abstract pages are created automatically when an article is uploaded into our home grown cms. They are not the full article and even the printable version is not the full article because you need to log in first to get it, but then you are behind the firewall.

The /article_printable.cfm?1763 url makes the print utility pop up on the page.

Thanks in advance. DJKay

[Jill]

You could exclude via robots.txt:

/article_printable.cfm?

[DJKay]

/article_printable.cfm?

So by doing that, we are telling the crawler not to crawl pages that have an /article_printable.cfm? in them...we dont have to put the entire string in there including the article parameter number?

Know this is a nit picky kind of question, Thanks in advance. DJKay

[Jill]

As long as the first part is the same on every article, then yes.

In other words, this /article_printable.cfm?
has to come right after your domain. If there's another directory or more in front of it, then you'd need to add that also.

[DJKay]

Hi Jill,

Thanks that is very helpful..I appreciate it. DJKay