Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I wonder whats the current thinking for using this tag on unimportant internal links like privacy statements.
I just drop a meta robots tag on those pages and be done with it...
<meta name="robots" content="none">...or the longhand version...
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">That nofollow attribute has never "felt right" to me and I've never used it, ever. If I have to think about nofollowing anything, then something isn't right within my structure. ;)
Also, what happens when your content is scraped and regurgitated elsewhere minus your
nofollow
in contrast, the robots meta tag will NOT stop the url from accumulating PageRank. If you use "noindex,follow" as the attribute value, then the page will still help to circulate PageRank, too.
I've been with pageoneresults on the internal rel="nofollow" issue for quite a while - it just felt wrong to me, so I didn't use it. However, I have been hearing about some successes from various SEO folks, so I'm curious. Googlers like Matt Cutts keep talking about it in a cautious but postive light, and that heightens my curiosity.
I'm currently working with one team to develop a large site High 6 figuires of urls at launch) thats due to go live in early fall. There are some flows in the site wireframe that look to me to be wasting PR circulation in a major way, especially since there are so many deep pages that we want to get cooking.
So I'm thinking of launching the site with a few rel="nofollow" attributes just to see what happens. For one thing, those urls will not be available through any other links anywhere, so I'll get to test if Google indexes those urls or not, even as url-only. If anything interesting shows up, I'll be sire to report on it.
[edited by: tedster at 1:31 pm (utc) on July 9, 2008]
Consequently usage of nofollow on internal links shows a very different intention from nofollow in META, if anything this should act as a red flag for an SE to do deeper analysis and if lots of such internal links are marked with rel=nofollow then clearly some kind of SEO games are going on, so the question is whether a particular SE likes being gamed like this or not.
When I speak of indiscriminate use, I'm thinking of some cases I know of where the main menu links were nofollowed, trying to drive more traffic to the sub-category pages. At least one case resulted in completely hosing the search traffic for the site. Some of their key anchor text was taken right out of the algo calculations!
But using rel="nofollow" for those utility pages is not nearly such a risk I think, unless you like seeing them in your Sitelinks ;)
I only use rel="nofollow" for url drops in forums and for spider traps. On "Contact Us" type pages, I use the meta noindex,nofollow tag and never had a one show up in serps, Sitelinks or otherwise.
[edited by: Key_Master at 1:53 pm (utc) on July 9, 2008]
why would you make it nofollow in the meta?, just because you dont want the contact us page indexed doesnt mean you don't want the links on that page followed.
Ya know, that's actually a good question. My idea was to remove the page entirely from the graph as it serves no real purpose in the overall scheme of things. I'd rather have the bot spend its time following links on other pages that are of higher importance.
But, I do understand where you are coming from, you could just noindex. Mind you, these are the "poor man's" method of having some control over indexing routines. There are of course other more efficient ways to do this.
Google Sitemaps allows you to block links from showing up in Sitelinks.
True, but you can't choose a replacement, you can only delete them.
Besides, with some rare exceptions (ie, sitemaps), I think that if the content on the page isn't fit to be indexed, why should the links? From a programmers prospective, it just seems like a fishy red flag to me.
True, but you can't choose a replacement, you can only delete them.
Maybe Google selects another replacement link. Don't know never had to block one.
I would think Sitelinks don't show up very often in searches or for that matter even clicked on often enough to justify retooling all your menu links with rel="nofollow", when a single meta tag on your "Contact Us" page would have the same effect.
Just my opinion. :)
On "Contact Us" type pages, I use the meta noindex,nofollow tag and never had a one show up in serps
Noindexing these type of overhead pages is something I'm very hesitant to do as I don't know what signals are used in part to establish "trust." Might Google or other SEs look to the presence of contact or privacy pages as such a signal? I don't know, but as long as they could, I want them to know that they're there.
I have a p3p privacy policy that Google and other search engines do crawl (and probably understand better than the made for humans version). Even without one, I doubt there would be a trust issue. They know the pages are there and they do crawl them- I'm just politely asking them not to include them in search results. That doesn't mean they can't be used for internal purposes.
If we take Google at their word, then the rel="nofollow" attribute is simply not followed at all, not even for url discovery.
Ya see, that is the part I could never really understand. If a scraper gets your content and then regurgitates it without all the nofollow stuff, what does that do?
I shouldn't knock the nofollow, all three of the majors worked on bringing that one to market, kudos. You probably won't find many "old, old school" SEOs using those things. If you are a publishing platform, then by all means, nofollow all of the comment links until such time that you've verified their quality and that "you trust them". That is what nofollow was meant for, to combat comment spam, bottom line.
The original protocol got somewhat warped shortly after its release and became a micro-tool for managing links. I'm sure Google saw this huge change in the link graph and they said to themselves, "hmmm, now looky there would ya, I do believe we have someone attemptin' to manipulate our algo. Would ya look at em all Pa!?"
nofollow was an "easy" way for Google to find what they were looking for. It served its purpose originally and still serves its purpose today. nofollow = micro-link manipulation. A clear signal in many instances. ;)
Ya see, that is the part I could never really understand. If a scraper gets your content and then regurgitates it without all the nofollow stuff, what does that do?
Google will follow the link. So if you're going to use rel="nofollow" for internal links, don't rely on it as a tool to prevent discovery of pages you don't want crawled. Somebody else can link to those pages and they will be crawled. It's best to cover your bases with a meta "noindex,nofollow" tag on those pages.
don't rely on it as a tool to prevent discovery of pages you don't want crawled
robots.txt should be used to prevent crawling of pages - some people use nofollow META tags and then get very angry if their pages still get crawled - those nofollow's apply to urls discovered on that page, so if they are found elsewhere they will still be crawled regardless of META nofollow on some other page.
The nofollow is necessary in this example because internal site links are using rel="nofollow" to prevent the passage of PR to the page. I don't think anybody would want to pass low, and possibly untrusted PR from the links on that page to other links on their site.
Unfortunately, those urls will still show up in search results.
Well, if this page shows up in results then maybe it is a relevant page and it should not even be disallowed in robots.txt?
Well, if this page shows up in results then maybe it is a relevant page and it should not even be disallowed in robots.txt?
Maybe this link will help describe the issue better. And yes, I agree, robots.txt is a poor choice in this particular example.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Noindexing these type of overhead pages is something I'm very hesitant to do as I don't know what signals are used in part to establish "trust." Might Google or other SEs look to the presence of contact or privacy pages as such a signal? I don't know, but as long as they could, I want them to know that they're there.
One approach to this I'm considering would be to use the rel nofollow attribute on these service links from the home page, but not use them on links from some inner pages. Seems this might help channel home page PR to where I want it to go, but would assure that these pages are indexed via links from lesser pages. I don't know what kinds of quality signals, if any, this might send.
I've got to confess that up till now I've been very wary about using the nofollow attribute for PR sculpting, because it might send signals of micro-manipulation (assuming that Google wanted to bother with micro-analysis of micro-manipulation).
use the rel nofollow attribute on these service links from the home page, but not use them on links from some inner pages
Moi aussi - it's not that I want to orphan these pages, but if I can send them less PR and others more then great. The clients want these links prominent so removing them from the template is not an option.
Has anyone from an SE said anything even slightly detrimental about use of nofollow internally, even after the PR sculpting experiment was published? I don't follow these things daily, but I've yet to read anything.
I like Tedster's iframe idea too and have used that - sort of like an invisible include file. But doing this (or using Javascript to import links) means that in Analytics the site overlay showing click data doesn't work because the links are no longer in the code file - and that is handy information. So I only use iframes for boilerplate text or for search functions to minimise code bloat.
I was just thinking that nofollow on internal urls can have completely different interpretation than nofollow on external urls (that may imply spam).
Many sites use the no follow to hoard pagerank. They try use it on pages such as contact us, about us etc.
Wondering how G feels about this... Is this considered spam or an unethical policy.
