[trendoman]

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you..

I read the slogan simple open source CMS for designers, No knowledge of PHP required at all

Does that slogan says - with CouchCMS no SEO skills required? No html skills required? No nothing required?
Check this quote then http://docs.couchcms.com/requirements.html:

you must at least have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS and know the basics of creating a website.

Remember, all advices here about your front-end/seo issues are non-professional. They come cheap exactly because this is not seo forum. Whatever you are advised here should come with a disclaimer, that it can affect your ranking and seo positions negatively.

[trendoman]

and then I have to read ten thousand pages of documentation and be a rock star developer

Here we go: http://www.couchcms.com/hire-us/
Save on beer and chips, save yourself weeks of reading docs. Cheap things come out much more expensive in the end. Don't you regret that a year of time is wasted?

Hi diverso,

To use couch you don't need to know php but that said basic knowledge of html and webdesign is indeed needed. To understand how couch works you need to read documentation. If you have a drivers license you don't need to know how a road is made but you need to read your car's manual to know what kind of gasoline is used in that car.

SEO is very arbitrary knowledge so you can't expect a full solution from this forum

the tag

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<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

goes in the head of the page you don't want to show up in google


the tag

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<a href="admin.php" rel="nofollow">admin</a>

goes in the link you do't want google to follow.

@trendoman, I kind of agree with @diverso. There's no need to criticize someone's questions. It would be better to just not answer.

@diverso, I kind of agree with @trendoman. Your issue has to do with basic web design and site management. It's nothing to do with the cms. Nonetheless, we're willing to help. Sorry if the suggestions don't always help. It can be hard giving good advice.

I think @srewebso gave the best answer. Use a robots.txt file to tell Google not to index those pages.

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User-agent: *
Disallow: /cms/
Disallow: /sitemap.xml

Sitemap: http://www.designdiverso.com/sitemap.xml

Name this file robots.txt and place it in your site root. Have some patience. It might take a little time for Google to update the listings.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608

Hi,

@tim

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Disallow: /sitemap.xml

I don't understand this line ... this results that the sitemap would not be indexed by google or not ?

There's no need to criticize someone's questions. It would be better to just not answer.

+1 from me. One should be able to ask any questions if they have a problem, even when there is someone who thinks the question is trivial. It's useless to respond on a question with your opinion about that question.

this results that the sitemap would not be indexed by google?

Yes. That's how I understand it. The line

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Disallow: /sitemap.xml

means something like "Do not crawl or index sitemap.xml in the site's root." It refers to an explicit url, relative to the site's root.

For comparison,

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Disallow: /cms/

means something like "Do not crawl or index the directory cms in the site's root or anything in it."

Something completely different,

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Disallow: *.txt

would mean something like "Do not crawl or index any files ending with '.txt'."

The line

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Sitemap: http://www.designdiverso.com/sitemap.xml

tells robots where to find the site's sitemap. If you were using a Couch-generated sitemap, it would be

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Sitemap: http://www.designdiverso.com/sitemap.php

The Google support pages I linked to give details about syntax for the robots.txt file.

@tim

Thanks for your detailed robots.txt file explanation. However I don't need that I'm perfectly aware of the use and syntax of that file.

I don't understand why you would place Disallow: /sitemap.xml in that file and then point google to your sitemap with Sitemap: http://www.designdiverso.com/sitemap.php, if you don't want to use a sitemap ... don't create one.... . The only purpose of a sitemap is to hand google an easy way to index your site.

@tim

Thanks for your detailed robots.txt file explanation. However I don't need that I'm perfectly aware of the use and syntax of that file.

I don't understand why you would place Disallow: /sitemap.xml in that file and then point google to your sitemap with Sitemap: http://www.designdiverso.com/sitemap.php, if you don't want to use a sitemap ... don't create one.... . The only purpose of a sitemap is to hand google an easy way to index your site.

I agree. It's pretty convoluted. The original issue was that the sitemap was showing up in search results and @diverso didn't want it to. Thus, the line

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Disallow: /sitemap.xml

I though one might still want to point Google to the sitemap, even if they don't want it indexed. I guess "Disallow: /sitemap.xml" would prevent Google from crawling it at all, even for the sake of indexing it. So you're right. It's pointless to have those two lines together.

well maybe i'm lost here but i was under the impression that diverso's admin pages did show up in the search results. So I suppose Disallow: /couch/ would solve that.

The other thing is, as far as I know google won't handle a sitemap as a web page but as a protocol file and won't index such a file for there search results.

well maybe i'm lost here but i was under the impression that diverso's admin pages did show up in the search results. So I suppose Disallow: /couch/ would solve that.

You are correct. In @diverso's case it's Disallow: /cms/

The other thing is, as far as I know google won't handle a sitemap as a web page but as a protocol file and won't index such a file for there search results.

@diverso showed an image of both the login page and sitemap.xml showing in search results. viewtopic.php?p=23641#p23641

I've seen other sitemaps that show in search results, too. For myself, I don't think it really matters. To me SEO has more to do with having plenty of good quality content that's pertinent to your customers. Less so about fiddling with technical settings.

So let me change my advice to @diverso. Put

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Disallow: /cms/

into a robots.txt file to remove the login page from search results. Forget about the sitemap page. Remove it from your site altogether if you want. I think you'll be fine without it.