No index readme.html

[peterwilsoncc]

A ​search for text in the WordPress readme.html file shows a lot of sites with the page showing up in their search results (you will need to click "show duplicate results".

In all likelihood this is unintended by the site owner as the content is unrelated to their site. It also affects the SEO results of the ​install guide on WordPress.org.

To prevent this, it would be beneficial to add a noindex,nofollow meta tag to the header of this page.

As this is a small change, I've put it on the 6.8 milestone as a task but I'm happy if the release squad would prefer to wait until the next release.

Follow up to #63000.

[sabernhardt]

@dd32 also mentioned this in a ​Slack discussion.

[audrasjb]

The above PR correctly adds a meta tag in the readme.html file, but what about adding a directive in the virtual robots.txt file?

[audrasjb]

Hmm. Second thought: Given we're in the beta cycle and as this is in fact an enhancement, let's keep it in a limited scope and a self-contained, low-risk change :)

A follow-up ticket can always be created later to update the virtual robots.txt file, if needed.

[audrasjb]

Note: This will need a Make/Polyglots post to let Locales know that the readme file was modified. Indeed, some historic locales (such as fr_FR) are managing their own version of the readme.html file.
Example: ​https://i18n.svn.wordpress.org/fr_FR/trunk/dist/

I'm adding the needs-dev-note workflow keyword as a reminder that we'll need a note on Make/Polyglots P2.

[audrasjb]

In 59949:

General: Add noindex,nofollow meta tag to the readme.html file.

Site owners likely don't intend for the content of the readme.html file to be indexed, as it's unrelated to the site content.

Follow-up to [59944].

Props peterwilsoncc, sabernhardt, dd32, audrasjb, abcd95.
Fixes #63069.
See #63000.

tickets with keyword good-first-bug should be kept for new contributors so they can learn to contribute to WordPress Core. It doesn't look like you are a new contributor :)

Understood @audrasjb 😃

[JeffPaul]

Note that the dev note for this is ​drafted and part of the Miscellaneous Dev Note.

[JeffPaul]

This has now been published as a section in the ​Miscellaneous developer changes in WordPress 6.8 dev note post.