[Dspace-general] Versions 1.5 and 1.5.1 index issue

[Michele Kimpton]

Dear members of the community,

If you are currently running DSpace 1.5 or DSpace 1.5.1, your site is  
not being indexed by Google, Google scholar or any public search  
engine for that matter.  The issue has been fixed in 1.5.2.  However,  
you can fix the problem immediately by removing the line in the   
robots.txt file that reads disallow:/browse.

I highly recommend you take this simple action as soon as possible so  
your publicly available content is indexed.  As many of you know as  
much as 60% of traffic to your DSpace resources comes from Google and  
other public search engines.
You can find more detail at:  http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/Ensuring_your_instance_is_indexed

To improve the ability of your site to be indexed you should also  
install site maps- which makes it much easier for any search engine to  
discover all the links within your site.  This is part of version  
1.5.2, but you can also install a patch at:   http://jira.dspace.org/jira/browse/DS-35

Google and most other search engines do not use OAI-PMH for indexing,  
please do not rely on this protocol for search engine exposure.

Let me know if you have any questions.

best, Michele Kimpton
Executive Director, DSpace Foundation