On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 3:06 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Transparency. There is no benefit and a great drawback to not indexing. Not indexing makes it appear we are hiding something. That belief is already very prevalent among our critics, we don't want to feed them a ton of raw steak.
You are welcome to weigh the benefit as insufficient, when you say "no benefit" you're insulting several experienced and trusted users here who see substantial benefit.
I've yet to see anyone accuse us of hiding things on the basis of the many things we already no-index. Can you provide a pointer? On the flipside I can point to several examples of WP critics complaining that our sausage-making is showing up at the top of Google, above more useful links, just on the basis of our domain's high position.
If your concern is transparency and avoiding criticism for hiding things there are several gigantic elephants in the room that are not yet addressed which make no-indexing seem utterly insignificant by comparison. For example, consider the fact that deletion and oversight cause mis-attribution of edits, and that we frequently use deletion to hide widely linked to bad edits ... really to avoid people being mislead by the links, but someone could argue that we're hiding our errors).