Quick notification to the list regarding search engine indexing of the JISCMail archive.

As you may be aware all list emails are archived at the following address -

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=data-protection

We have recently been asked about the policy on this because this page appears to have increased in visibility over the past few months.  This has resulted in, amongst other examples, searches on the names of subscribers now featuring more prominently in search results.

The example which was cited is Google.  The only thing I can put it down to is that Google recently changed their algorithms and this may have affected the positioning of results.  The list staff have made no changes and to our knowledge neither have JISC themselves.

There is more information about this change here - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

You will notice that the intention of this change was to give more credit to pages which are of higher quality, so we can at least be grateful of something.

Email addresses are obscured for users who are not logged in and are therefore not indexed.

The posters' names however are indexed, and are also available in the archive without the requirement to authenticate.

On behalf of the staff I can currently state that we're not planning to make any changes to any of this but felt it appropriate to remind list users of the exact situation.

Obviously we'll also entertain debate on the matter and should consensus indicate that we can do more then we'll investigate that.

Ian
on behalf of the moderators.
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