Blog Search: Redirects and Indexing

The great thing about launching Blog Search is that it's very easy to find out what people are saying about the product. And the feedback has been great. Plus, it means that we find out about potential issues right away.

Here are a couple questions we've seen:

• "After clicking on a result in Blog Search, I'm being passed through a redirect. Why?"

Sadly, this wasn't part of an overly clever click-harvesting scheme. We had the redirects in place during testing to prevent referrer-leaking and simply didn't remove them prior to launch. But they should be gone in the next 24 hours ... which will have the advantage of improving click-through time.


• "I included a robots.txt or <meta> tag to prevent the indexing of my blog. Why does it appear in Blog Search?"

As covered in the FAQ, Blog Search was designed to respect robots.txt and NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW meta tags. Unfortunately, we discovered a bug which caused some of these blogs to be indexed despite the presence of the meta tags.

We are already in progress on removing from the index those blogs that were affected and apologize for the unintended exposure.