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Robot => Do not follow this link!

         

blaketar

3:56 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Is their a safe tag that you know of that will not allow a robot or search spider to follow a link?

I have some Flag Links (feedback, spam, etc..) links and I want only live people to be able to follow these links, not robots. Is this possible?

<a href="www....com">Only Real-Live People</a>

MarkHutch

4:00 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

place this between the <head> - </head> part of your page. It should work if the search engines follow meta robots tags.

monkeythumpa

4:07 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have also seen some of the big news sites use comment tags, anybody know if these work?

<!-- Google off -->

<!-- Google on -->

I have seen it on more than one of the TV networks online news divisions.

blaketar

4:16 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I need something on the link level however. I want the bots to include or spider the page, just not follow a select number of links on the page...

Lord Majestic

4:20 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Use JavaScript for those links in addition to meta tags.

JAB Creations

9:06 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Blake... good bots will not follow links if you have the meta tag saying no-follow. This is a good way to scan your access logs for bots accessing files that you don't want and then banning their ip/agents from returning.

MarkHutch

9:10 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<!-- Google off -->

<!-- Google on -->

My guess is this is directed at the news.google.com bot.

zooloo

9:43 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



At link level it's: rel=nofollow

Search Webmaster World for all need to know about it.

:)

zoo

Lord Majestic

10:43 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



This is a good way to scan your access logs for bots accessing files that you don't want and then banning their ip/agents from returning.

This is a bit premature -- META tags can only be read by crawler that read THAT page, where as links that were disallowed by META may have been used on other sites. This means banning bots for accessing links not disallowed in robots.txt but just METAs is not really fair thing to do.

At link level it's: rel=nofollow

NoFollow is really used as NoRank, ie to avoid assigning weight to that link pointing to another page. They really picked misleading name, Google itself states:

"From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

This does NOT mean link won't be followed, just it won't get credit.

4specs

9:13 pm on May 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Assuming the URL is on a site you control, use robots.txt to stop the spider.

It may take a day or so. Good spiders obey. Ones that do not, will probably not obey anything.

blaketar

11:48 pm on May 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think Lord Masjestic may be right...

Since the link simply reloads the current page, only appends a couple of variables onto the url, javascript may be the only solution!

n8er

5:54 pm on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'd use a robots.txt file. This is basically a text file that you through into a directory on your site that you don't want to have crawled.

[searchtools.com...]

There is some better explanations here. WIth the robots.txt file you can tell certain bots not to index certain pages.

blaketar

6:03 pm on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hate to be such a pain but robots.txt will not work either.

The solution I came up with may be overkill but works great. I have a script which identifies if the 'Visitor' is a robot or known spider. If it is the three links I DO NOT WANT available to bots are not displayed!

keyplyr

8:59 pm on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I need something on the link level however. I want the bots to include or spider the page, just not follow a select number of links on the page...

<a rel="nofollow" href="webpage.html">

Not sure how many bots other than Google support this

Lord Majestic

9:05 pm on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<a rel="nofollow" href="webpage.html">

Not sure how many bots other than Google support this

NoFollow value or rel attribute is a misleading name not designed to prevent bots from following URLs. It was designed to give hint to indexers to adjust (to zero) weight of the link in their link analysis algorithms.

Its incorrect naming gives impression that link won't be followed, but this is not what this value was designed for. Here is what Google said about it:

"From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

keyplyr

9:49 am on May 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Thanks for clarifying Lord Majestic.