Yesterday, the SKWAWKBOX revealed the ‘noindex‘ metatag added to the Labour party web page for Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘democracy review’. The effect of this tag is to prevent the page being listed in search engine results.
Labour’s HQ confirmed that the tag was not accidental and referred to emails that had been sent to members with a link to provide their input to the review – but this begs the question of why bother putting the page on the site at all if you’re going to hide it.
Now the situation has become murkier with confirmation to this blog by a leader’s office (LOTO) source that neither Corbyn nor his office had given approval for the noindex measure:
We absolutely did not sanction that tag or anything else that would limit the number of people participating. On the contrary, we want input from as many people as possible so we get the benefit of everyone’s perspective.
Whatever the intent behind the insertion of the code into the page, it was done or ordered by someone at ‘DarkSide’ – LOTO’s nickname for the party’s bureaucratic Southside HQ – without consultation with Jeremy Corbyn and his team.
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Can you provide a link to the democracy review page?
https://labour.org.uk/about/democracy-review-2017/
https://labour.org.uk/about/democracy-review-2017/
Not sure if you aware but you can get a page reindex and available in Google serp results in just a few minutes via the Google web Master page, i haven’t done one for quite a while but used to be possible.
Iain McNicol would be well advised to resign before he is sacked.
Because he is going to be sacked.
Aye, this appears to have his prints all over it!
So, tell me folks: when are we going to DENAND that McNichol and his henchmen/women stand down? Their behaviour over the past 30 months has been an absolute disgrace and an affront to democracy. Words fail me – it seems to me that too many people in Britain are prepared to ‘lie down and take it’, as it were. Certain members of the party and particularly in the NEC believe that they can act with impunity. They’ve done nothing but bring disrepute and managed to make Labour miss out on election success.
Ok, you need to calm down about this one. It’s common practice for any Web programmer to add a noise tag to a page which is linked to from an email. If the sile purpose of a page is to provide further info or functionality to an email then there’s no need for Google to index it – in fact allowing Google to index it reduces the Googlability of other pages in the site.
Of course no one in Corbyn’s team sanctioned it! Jesus, if we had to ask non techies every time we made a straightforward technical decision nothing would ever get done.
Forget this – get back to concentrating on the real damage that the Tories and nuLabour are doing…
Ok, no editing opportunity, just noticed that autocorrect made a pig’s ear of my post. Hope you get the gist…
According to Labour, it was done for a reason – one not in line with the leader’s office’s aim of reaching as widely as possible
The Labour Party NEC is a law unto itself!
Not only do they not give a FLYING-F for fairness, democracy and free speech!
They Hand out suspensions when members disagree with the RIGHT in our PARTY!
Time for CHANGE IN THE NEC, no more witch hunts by the right!
Nothing in my inbox, can anyone share this link that is supposed to have been shared with all members?
You should have received this link in an email titled ‘Have your say’:
https://labour.org.uk/about/democracy-review-2017/
This is the page with the ‘noindex’ tag
I’ve been addressing this from another angle by contacting the web developer in charge of the Labour Party website, Wide Eye Creative. They are based in Washington USA would you believe? So far I’ve been met with stony silence –
Labour Party Website Banned From Internet Search –
https://domesticempire.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/labour-party-website-banned-from-internet-search/