Python Decorator for Preventing Robot Indexing

By  on  

Much of my time at Mozilla has been spent catching up to the rest of the MDN team with respect to python.  The new MDN backend, codenamed Kuma, is entirely Django-based and has been a joy to learn.  My latest python adventures have been focused on increasing MDN's SEO score, a task which includes telling Google not to index given pages.  In doing so, I created my first view decorator:  a decorator that sends a response header which prevents a robot from indexing the given page.

The Python

The first step is importing the decorator dependencies:

from functools import wraps

The next step is creating the decorator definition:

def prevent_indexing(view_func):
    """Decorator to prevent a page from being indexable by robots"""
    @wraps(view_func)
    def _added_header(request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = view_func(request, *args, **kwargs)
        response['X-Robots-Tag'] = 'noindex'
        return response
    return _added_header

The original view is processed so that the response can be received;  simple add a key of X-Robots-Tag to the response, value set to noindex, and the decorator is complete!

To use the decorator, simply add it to a given view:

@login_required
@prevent_indexing
def new_document(request):
	""" Does whatever 'new_document' should do; page should not be indexed """

Voila -- the X-Robots-Tag header will be sent so that robots wont index the page!  Decorators allow for loads of additional functionality for any view, and are easily reusable;  I'm glad to add them to my arsenal!

Recent Features

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Counters

    Counters.  They were a staple of the Geocities / early web scene that many of us "older" developers grew up with;  a feature then, the butt of web jokes now.  CSS has implemented its own type of counter, one more sane and straight-forward than the ole...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!