Would 401 Error be a good choice? [closed]

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On one of my sites have a lot of restricted pages which is only available to logged-in users, and for everyone else it outputs a default "you have to be logged in ... " view.

The problem is; a lot of these pages are listed on Google with the not-logged-in-view, and it looks pretty bad when 80% of the pages in the list have the same title and description/preview.

Would it be a good choice to, along with my default not-logged-in-view, send a 401 un开发者_开发问答authorized header? And would this stop Google (and other engines) to index these pages?

Thanks!

(and if you have another (better?) solution I would love to hear about it!)

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Use a robots.txt to tell search engines not to index the not logged in pages.

http://www.robotstxt.org/

Ex.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /error/notloggedin.html

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401 Unauthorized is the response code for requests that requires user authentication. So this is exactly the response code you want and have to send. Status Code Definitions

EDIT: Your previous suggestion, response code 403, is for requests, where authentication makes no difference, eg. disabled directory browsing.

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here are the status codes googlebot understands and recommends. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132 in your case an HTTP 403 would be the right one.