NOINDEX FOLLOW Metatag Question

How to handle content-rich pages that you don't want in SERP results?

[Whoa]

I've read the basics on NOINDEX, FOLLOW metatags but it's still not clear to me how to use them properly for search engines like Google to get best results.

Specifically, I have a ten-page HTML tour on my site. Every page has good content that reflects well on the theme of our site.

These pages were indexed by Google and, as a result, each of the pages in the tour occasionally pops up in SERP.

However, if a Google user links to Page7.html, it's probably not the best experience because they are dropped into the middle of the tour without any context.

Ideally, if a keyword phrase "XYZ" is on Page7.html, I'd like Google to show Page1.html as the result, even if "XYZ" isn't on Page1 -- any guidance on how to get that result would be great, but my question is more about the specifics of how NOINDEX, FOLLOW works.

Specifically, I'm wondering if I say NOINDEX, FOLLOW on Page7.html will Google review and give me "credit" for good content but not add that page to the index OR does it mean that Google will ignore the content completely and just bypass it to follow the links?

[pageoneresults]

> OR does it mean that Google will ignore the content completely and just bypass it to follow the links?

According to the specification of the nofollow, noindex robots terms, yes. You are telling Google to not index that page and only follow the links from that page.

But, if you have that same tag on the other pages and there are links leading to other pages that have the same tag, you've created a noindex loop. This means that any page in the loop will not get indexed if there are links pointing to and from the noindex pages. Eek, that sounds confusing.

Google is going to show the pages from your site that match the search query. If that page 7 comes up for XYZ and you want users to end up at page 1, then the only real way to have only your page 1 show up is to disallow all the other pages in the loop and keep them out of the index.

Do you want to really do that? I'd suggest making sure that users have a quick way to navigate to page 1 of the tour.

You might want to take a look at these tags for indexing spiders...

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.domain.com/page-name.htm">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.domain.com/page-name.htm">
<link rel="start" href="http://www.domain.com/page-name.htm">

[Whoa]

Thanks. The info, especially your educating me about REL, is very helpful.

The tour does allow links to page1 from every page. I just thought that NOINDEX, FOLLOW might avoid PageRank loss to the sub-pages in the tour and let it accrue to the starting page but still give me "credit" for having good theme-specific content on the sub-pages.

It sounds like I should just let Google et al index the sub-pages because otherwise I'll permanently loose SERP hits that I'm currently getting on the sub-pages (e.g. a hit for "XYZ" because it's on Page7 but not on Page1).