New Charts, Page Redesigns, and an Honest SEO Mistake

Hi! It’s been about a month since my last update in late November. Here’s what’s new.

📊 Charts Everywhere

We added Chart.js charts to patron, fund, and institution pages. These show donation history over time, making it easy to see giving patterns at a glance.

For example, on a patron page you can now see which years they were most active. On fund pages, you can see how donor participation has changed over time. The charts only appear when there’s enough data to make them useful.

You can see examples on pages like The Metropolitan Museum of Art or Agnes Gund.

These are especially helpful for patrons who make a lot of donations over time, and those are exactly the types of donors that we hope to highlight more here.

👤 Patron Page Overhaul

Patron pages got a significant visual refresh:

• Stat cards at the top showing total donations, number of institutions, and contribution count

• Institution grid layout that makes it easier to see where someone donates

• Filterable donation table so you can sort and explore contributions

• Story blocks that highlight key information about each patron

The previous versions of these pages were quite bleak. The goal was to make the pages feel more like a profile and less like a data dump.

🏛️ Institution Page Redesign

Institution pages now have a cleaner look with a slate color scheme and stat cards matching the patron pages. We also removed pagination entirely. So all 176 institutions now display on a single page, which makes browsing and searching much faster.

⚠️ The Noindex Incident

I have to be honest about something that happened this month.

We accidentally removed the noindex tag from many patron pages during a code refactor. This tag tells Google not to index certain pages – specifically, patrons with very few contributions who don’t really need to be in search results.

The result? Google started indexing hundreds of thousands of pages that were previously hidden. Our traffic spiked to over 2,000 visitors per day.

That sounds great, but it wasn’t intentional. Many of those pages are thin content. That means we were indexing patrons with just one or two small donations. Having them all in Google’s index isn’t good for anyone.

We fixed the issue and restored the noindex logic. Traffic is now back down to a more humble 300-400 visitors per day.

Lesson learned: always double-check SEO tags after refactoring. I hope this isn’t going to negatively affect us for too long.

🔗 Improved Schema for Funds

Fund pages now include sameAs schema linking to official institutional URLs. This helps Google understand that our fund pages are related to real organizations.

We also added location data (city and state) for local SEO, and updated the schema to use the Museum type for parent organizations. These changes should help fund pages appear in more relevant searches.

🤖 Fighting the Bots

SEO crawler bots have been hammering the site. These aren’t search engines. They’re third-party tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and DataForSEO that scrape websites to sell data. (This problem kept growing, and in August 2026 I wrote a full investigation: 99% of My Website Traffic Is Bots.)

We now block about a dozen of these bots in robots.txt:

• AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit

• SemrushBot and related crawlers

• DataForSeoBot

• MJ12bot (Majestic)

• Several others

We’ve also added Cloudflare firewall rules to block some particularly aggressive actors that ignore robots.txt or don’t use a specific agent type. This reduces load on the database and keeps our costs down, but I do worry that it will negatively impact our search traffic in the long run.

✨ Small Improvements

A few other fixes worth mentioning:

• Underlined links throughout the site for better visibility and accessibility

• Year filter styling – cleaner look without the old circle design

• Favicons restored on fund leaderboards

• Button visibility fixes for pagination and “See More” toggles

🔮 What’s Next

I plan for us to get back to growing the database in January 2026. We’ve passed 1.5M contributions now and the march towards 2M and then 3M continues.

If you have feedback or feature requests, connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at nick@patronview.com.

Thanks for following along!

– Nick Gray