On the one hand, we would like our content that we publish here on the Hive Blockchain to be found in the search engines. But there is also the flip side of this - namely content that we don't want to have in the search engines. During my work as a web developer, I often come to the point where it is necessary or even common to exclude pages from indexing in the search engine. These include, for example, the legal notice or the privacy policy. These contents are important for the legal aspects of a website but do not offer any valuable content for the search engine and the ranking of the actual page. It is therefore common practice to exclude these pages from indexing when the site is launched.
Ideogram V2 Turbo • NONE • 16:9 • Feb 15, 2025 8:48 PM Prompt: "A bot sitting in front of the computer and missing his spam articles listed on the search engine - showing access denied in a warm cozy nightsky environment"
If it's up to me, we should be able to use these functions (and I'm speaking here for all frontends) to exclude content written to the blockchain from indexing based on various criteria. And one thing up front - this has nothing to do with censorship. What I want is that content that is low-quality, spam, scam or simply dangerous for other visitors is not included in the global search engines.
Fortunately, most if not all search engines adhere to a standard - noindex and nofollow. And the whole thing should then look like this in the HTML source code for a blog post/comment etc. that should not be indexed:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
- noindex → Prevents Google & other search engines from indexing the page.
- nofollow → Prevents links on the page from being crawled.
What content should not be indexed by search engines? A few examples.
Again and again I see spam, a lot of spam here on the blockchain... Be it spam content - nonsense content, e.g. for casinos, which has been appearing more frequently recently:
And we especially don't want to see content on our blockchain that is obviously a phishing attack. If someone clicks on a link that came to our blockchain via the search engine, there will be a lot of shouting afterwards. So it should be possible to nip such content in the bud.
As there are technical options for blocking content before it is indexed by Google, I am now calling on the larger frontends to comment on this topic and discuss the technical details of whether this feature should be included in the frontends and whether the frontends are prepared to implement it.
@peakd / @asgarth @jarvie
@ecency / @good-karma
hive.blog / @blocktrades / @howo / @quochuy
@leofinance @inleo @khaleelkazi
What comes directly to my mind is that all articles and comments that have a reputation of less than X, which are known to have already ended up on the blacklists - or can effectively be quickly put on a no-index list manually if downvotes / blacklists are not fast enough - are put on the no-index list. Feel free to join the discussion - all other users are also welcome to join the discussion here. Your opinion? Let us know in the comments. Thank you!