Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In the course of trying to improve rankings of my pages, I have been adding rel="nofollow" on links and have also been adding noindex, nofollow to robots metatags in the headers of some of my pages.
The pages I have been doing this to are substantially duplicate content, but because of how the information is presented, are valuable to my users so redirecting these pages is not an option.
So here's the situation.
How will adding nofollows and sometimes noindex to pages affect Adsense on those pages?
Specifically ad targeting and payout?
Does anyone have experience with this?
However, we do not know how Google interprets 'nofollow' use - and your use is certainly not what nofollow was built for.
It is conceivable that will affect your Google rankings (I wouldn't put it stronger than that!), in which case adsense would be indirectly affected by reduced google referrals.
Certainly worth being sure there isn't a better way; once you start misusing tools, however clean your motives, you can easily get in deep sh**.
For example, no amount of nofollow will hide duplicate content from Google; the SEs do follow nofollow, they just don't 'count' it as a link.
robots.txt, noindex and removal are really much, much more effective, and no unknown risks to worry about.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that if Google finds duplicate content on your website, they will assign higher relevance (for search engine results) to one of the pages, and suppress the rest. However the Google algorithm will choose which page gets the high search engine ranking.
I think what you're trying to accomplish could be done by using <priority> tags in your sitemap. This allows you to suggest to the algorithm which page you think should have the highest relevance. Look for "priority" on this page:
[sitemaps.org...]
For example, no amount of nofollow will hide duplicate content from Google; the SEs do follow nofollow, they just don't 'count' it as a link.robots.txt, noindex and removal are really much, much more effective, and no unknown risks to worry about.
Since SEs will still follow 'nofollow', I guess that shouldn't be a problem. So now I'm wondering if 'noindex' will have a negative effect on targeting. So far so good. I'll report back if I see any problems on the no index pages.
