Indexing PDFs

Many of the linked documents on the Parish Council website are in the format of PDF files. While this a convenient method of publishing there are limitations regarding the indexing of these pages.

The E-News pages are such PDFs. These can, and are, specifically submitted for index when they are uploaded. This is so they appear in Google (and other) searches within a few hours of upload.

The limitation is that there is not as much control of whether the search engine robots find the pages and index them without being asked. A NOINDEX directive cannot be added to the PDF but a previously indexes PDF can be requested to be removed from the Google index.

Under normal circumstances there is no problem with the PDFs appearing in Internet searches. However, when an edition of the E-News appears in a search result that references an earlier event that coould be confused with a current event it needs to be removed from the index.

In some respects all editions of the E-News other than the current edition could be requested to be removed.

A case in point is the November 2023 quiz night that when searched for returns a listing for the 1st edition of the E-News