StuffOfInterest - 3:02 pm on Sep 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

If this is the way Google is now handling internal nofollow attributes it could be really good for me. Over a year ago I took a gamble and implemented nofollow on my internal links. My site has a few hundred content pages, pages with original unique text or images, and many thousands of "reference" or "placeholder" pages, pages which point to a place but don't have any details. Being that both types of pages are in the same directory tree I can't use a simple robots.txt directive to tell the crawlers some pages are not worth looking at. What I ended up donig was putting robots meta-tags on the non-content pages and nofollow attributes on any pages pointing to the non-content pages.

Has this helped? I can't really say. I still see a lot of placeholder pages in the search results. As mentioned earlier, Yahoo slurps up anything it can find. Google does seem to be getting more selective on what it goes after on my site. Hopefully, in time, I'll start to see cleaner results. At least it is good to know that I shouldn't be incurring a penalty for setting things up this way.