Hi michelleh

The solution given by Dan above is the most reliable method as robots.txt will not block pages that googlebot finds via an external link to the page. Given the reasoning behind your desire to noindex, reliability is extremely important.

Also, you want "noindex, follow" rather than "noindex, nofollow" as the nofollow will trap any link value coming into the pages (from both internal and external links) and stop it from flowing through the site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Thanks Alan,

I will continue to use the server response setting when generating other sitemaps and recommend that our Techs ditch the home grown script that assigns the single date and time in future.

II must say also, it is great to have such clear and reliable advice - very glad to have you around!

Thanks again.

Hi Bill,

I assume when you say "I do email my list with each new blog post" that you are bulk emailing your established readers, to let them know you have posted since I can't see an RSS subscribe button on the site.

The fact is that established readers for the most part don't need to read anything more than the post you are telling them about in your email. They have most likely already read any other material on your site that interests them.

It is well known that blogs with significant numbers of subscribers often have high Analytics bounce rates for this reason. The data to focus on is sources of your traffic. Do you have a large proportion of referral or direct (type-in) traffic?

The thing to remember is that the bounce rate reported in Analytics is not the same as "real bounce rate" determined independently by the engines. "Real bounce rate" takes into account time on page. I would think it most unlikely that you will see any negative impact in Google or Bing with the time on page numbers you are quoting.

My most constructive advice would be:

1. Check to see exactly what percentage of your traffic is coming from search as opposed to referrals/type-ins
2. Stop messing with things to try to fix what isn't really broken - sooner or later it will hurt you.

The other comments here about the "look" of the site are probably valid - the style does bear a resemblance to some "sales letter" type sites, but on the other hand, you do have a lot of content and it sounds like a good number of happy readers. I would think carefully about any changes you make.

Hope that helps,

Sha