Forum Moderators: phranque
Is this a good idea, or will it backfire? Basically, I am gonna put noindex on any page that just lists items or result pages or log in screens or confirmation screens and generally stuff that has no real value for a surfer. However, I will not put noindex on the FAQ page or the "about" page etc.
Does this sound like a good idea? Will this boost the SEO and give greater emphasis on my content pages by sorting out the "fluff"?
I dont think it will matter and I dont think it will improve your SEO. I have put noindex only on a few pages which consists less than 1% of the total pages and maybe thats why I saw no immediate effects.
Thoughts?
FOR LINKS (rel=""):
Assuming Page A --> Page B --> Page C ('-->' means links to) and none of the pages have <meta name="robots"> tags then
If the link on Page A to Page B has rel="noindex" it is simply telling the SEs NOT to index Page B because of this link. Page B can still make it into the indexes if the SEs discover Page B through some other link that omitted noindex, however the SE should not index Page B because of this particular link. This in no way affects link equity. Page A still passes link equity to Page B who can still pass it on to Page C. So my point is that using rel="noindex" in a link only prevents the target page from getting indexed because of this link. But it still passes link equity to the target page.
If the link on Page A to Page B has rel="nofollow" you are instructing the engines to NOT pass link equity to the target page. While some engines don't follow the link (as the name implies), some engines actually do follow the link anyway (not passing link equity) in hopes of discovering new links and content that can be indexed. My point here is NOFOLLOW mainly prevents the passing of link equity.
You can deduce what rel="nofollow,noindex" does.
FOR PAGES (<meta name="robots"...):
Assuming Page A --> Page B --> Page C ('-->' means links to) and none of the links have rel="" attributes for nofollow/noindex then
If Page B has <meta name="robots" content="noindex" then this tells the SEs Page B is NEVER to be indexed.
If Page B has <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" then this tells the SEs this page is NEVER to pass link equity to the targets of its outgoing links. It is up to the SEs whether or not they actually follow the link or not to discover new content.
If Page B has <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" then this tells the SEs never to index Page B and never to pass link equity from Page B to the targets of its outgoing links.
ALL OF THAT BEING SAID...
If you have a Contact Us link on all of your pages and your goal is to prevent wasting link equity because of links to your contactus.htm page... I would recommend the following:
All internal links to ContactUs.htm should include rel="nofollow" so that you don't pass your contactus.htm page link equity/PR from internal pages. So other outgoing links on your other internal pages will get to split the link equity that would have been passed to contactus.htm.
Do NOT include <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> on the contactus.htm page in case you have external links to that page. By excluding the meta tag on the contact us page, if you do have external links to contactus.htm then that incoming link equity from other sites will be passed through contactus.htm to other outgoing links on the contactus.htm (most likely those are to your other internal pages).
If you have 100 links on each of your internal pages (including one to contactus.htm) then adding the rel="nofollow" on the links to contactus.htm will cause the link equity to be split 99 ways per page instead of 100. However, if you have 10 links per internal page (including one to contactus.htm) then the rel="nofollow" on the links to contactus.htm will cause the link equity to be split 9 ways instead of 10). So the more outgoing links on your pages, the less this technique is going to help. In general, it is probably not even worth the effort IMO.
[edited by: ZydoSEO at 4:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2008]
