[Steven Zahm]

@ Ray

Because you’ve manually separated out the Connections entries on separate pages there’s really no way for the search widget to figure out which page it should directs the search. That’s why there’s the need for a results page.

As far as the no-index … don’t know, Connections has nothing to do with the no-index page meta tags and robots.txt file. It does not set or alter whatever is set to. It does not even look.

My guess is the site was indexable at one point. I would expect those to drop from the index at what ever time frame Google uses.

And looking at what is in the index, it appears that you did at one point have the category drop down. Google will following these “deep” links But since you’ve manually separated out the directory, you shouldn’t use the category drop down. Which, from my quick look, you are no longer using it.

Even with the category drop down not being used, I would still expect a large number in the index. Think about it for a second … you have many countries (21), in each on those pages you have a character index, so at the very minimum you have 21 countries x 26 in the index = 546. Then you have cities and towns and featured directories. So, it’ll add up, very quick.

Now, in theory, each of these should have different results from Connections (of course there’ll be some overlap) resulting in pages with unique content, so I do not see how it’ll negatively impact you in Google’s index. Sidenote, many of these pages are still empty (no results) … so, you’ll want to address that before going live.

Hope that helps!