Will 'no follow' on prevent transfer of SEO juice on redirected pages?
ablu272
6:14 pm on Apr 13, 2012 (gmt 0)
Some of my old site pages are popping up in search engines as 302s; so I'm going to have my developers update the redirects to 301s and place 'no index' code on them. I want to transfer as much SEO juice or Link juice from the old pages to the new pages. Should I add "no index, follow" or "no index, no follow" on these URLs when I redirect them?
phranque
9:40 am on Apr 15, 2012 (gmt 0)
welcome to WebmasterWorld, ablu272!
i would not use any form of robots exclusion protocol on those urls and allow them to be crawled and the 301s indexed.
the only response you need to return for those old site page requests is a 301 status code and a Location: header with the canonical url of the replacement page. or a 410 status code if the old page no longer exists.
301 Moved Permanently: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3.2 Location: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.30 410 Gone: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4.11
g1smd
5:43 pm on Apr 15, 2012 (gmt 0)
You can't add meta tags to a 301 redirect.
The redirect happens at the HTTP level, not in HTML code.
phranque
5:47 am on Apr 16, 2012 (gmt 0)
actually the protocol implies that you are expected to provide a small html document with the 301 status code and this document could certainly have meta tags but i wouldn't meta robots noindex this response.
