meta noindex nofollow vs rel="nofollow" to remove Sitelinks

[santapaws]

I have always thought the correct way of signalling non-important pages was to use the meta noindex nofollow. However i have noticed one example where the sitelinks continues to list a "meta noindex nofollow". I tried changing that to a rel="nofollow" from linkd pages and sure enough it drops of sitelinks. Switch back to metas and the page reapears. Now i was led too believe the affect of the two would be identical and the pages would be removed from the linking graph but in this case that hasnt happened, or at least the way sitelinks are calculated the two nofollows have different meanings. I have always chosen meta over rel because i thought rel was more directed at destination pages you have little control over or its not practical to use the meta. Anyone care to offer any feedback on the use of the two nofollows with regard to removing pages from sitelinks?

[tedster]

I wouldn't use either method - I'd use the Webmaster Tools account to remove the sitelinks I did not want.

However, I am surprised at your experience. Something seems a bit off when a noindex meta tagged url gets chosen as a sitelink.

[Shaddows]

Santapaws, you have misunderstood the metas (Tedsters accurate point about noindex being picked as a sitelink notwithstanding).

meta noindex,nofollow means:
"Do not return this page in SERPs regardless of merit; FROM this page, do not pass PR and treat all outbound links as plain text"

So, the page CAN still acquire PR and relevance, but it
a) Does not take advantage of its ranking potential
b) Does not pass on its ranking potential

OTOH, rel="nofollow" on every inbound link means the page never acquires any internal PR, and never gets contextualised in terms of site structure, thus would never be considered for sitelinks.

As Tedster observes, its a bit odd that G knows the page is not to appear in SERPs but thinks its ok to return as a sitelink

[Shaddows]

Another thing, using "noindex, nofollow" creates a 'dead page' that lands no trafic (apart from sitelinks) and aids no pages BUT STILL SUCKS PR FROM THE REST OF YOUR SITE.

While there must be good reason to use them in conjunction, no such reason springs to mind (a deceitful link page to display PR but not pass it being a possible exception, but you still lose the PR anyway, so why bother)

[santapaws]

im sorry but hasnt matt said that the meta nofollow will cause the page to drop off of the links graph? If that was the case then there would be no loss of pr.

If he didnt say that then i misread something somewhere and need to re-evaluate.

[santapaws]

ok this is what he said:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.)

So he said the actions of both meta and rel should be the same. But for me this hasnt been the case and clearly some guys are also saying they are not the same.

[Shaddows]

Yep, thats a misread.

meta nofollow is a page-level device that is exactly equivalent to putting rel="nofollow" on every link ON THAT PAGE.

It categorically does NOT stop inbound PR flow.

[Shaddows]

An application where you might want to NOFOLLOW all links might be on a resources page that you wanted to show in SERPs but that might ruin your internal linking structure or muddy relevance signals

[santapaws]

yep, it just hit me like a bullet! duh!