GNDP chooses to block access to its own website

Using a search engine to try to find the Greater Norwich Development Partnership can give some interesting results and unless you know what you are looking for you might have to dig a bit deeper than you would expect to find the right site (www.gndp.org.uk)

GNDP's web developers have chosen NOT to add a description after the URL which is the most usual way for people to check whether they have found the right website. For example if you wish to search for 'Stop Norwich Urbanisation' using Google you will see:

STOP NORWICH URBANISATION - home
SNUB is a community group based in Norwich, aimed at halting the urbanisation of Norwich......
www.snubcampaign.org

The Greater Norwich Development Partnership search shows only the following:

GNDP
www.gndp.org.uk

Note: The words Greater Norwich Development Partnership do not appear on this search result. As part of your search you might see other websites linking to the GNDP  eg Norfolk County Council. One might think that they don't wish to be found and a further dip into the HTML code behind their website pages leads one to conclude that this is indeed the case. The developers have used the following code:

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

According to Google this is used to block access to websites as it prevents search robots from going onto pages which use this particular meta tag. If you don't want to allow search engine spiders to crawl through your whole website that is the meta tag you would use. GNDP might initially have had their reasons for using this meta tag  but for the organisation which is running a major consultation that is prefers to conduct on-line to be still using it appears, at best, to be sloppy programming or, at worst, thoroughly unprofessional and just possibly deceptive.