No follow for html sitemap?
-
Hi,
I have been working on an e-commerce site and have been wondering if i should add the meta robot tag with no follows, on pages like delivery , terms, returns and the html sitemap?
From what I have read this seems a good idea, but i am a little confused as what to do with the html sitemap. I can understand that having this on the homepage will allow crawlers quick access to the deeper pages within the site. But would it be better to guide them down the natural route of the category navigation instead?
Thanks
-
Matt Cutts recommends against using nofollow this way -- now, you might want to take anything Matt says with a grain of salt, but we do know that you cannot control the flow of PageRank in this way. Your other pages will not get more PR because you have nofollowed others; instead Matt says, the PR is lost. See the video
That said, a larger site might benefit indirectly from a judicious use of the robots.txt file to prevent the indexing pf pages that are not likely to end up in the SERPs and allowing more of the site's crawl time allotment for pages that have SERP value.
-
Basically you'll use the html sitemap for your visitors. The reason for adding no follow to the html sitemap and the other pages is that you would like the link juice not going to pages you have no intention for ranking (being high up in the SERPs).
For the search engine robots you'll need a sitemap.xml file. So in the optimal situation you need two sitemaps. Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Any recommendations for an XML Sitemap for a large community website?
Hi all, Once of our clients is a large community website for parents/parenting. The standard Wordpress XML Sitemap plugin is throwing up lots of errors, etc, and is not ideal. Does anyone have any recommendations for either a tool that we could use to create a better one, or else a service that we could pay to use? Gavin
On-Page Optimization | | IcanAgency0 -
Should I include unnecessary pages in the sitemap.xml
I have a lot of pages that I don't want Google to index, so for most of them, I used cannonical, were they were duplicates, noindex were I wanted to remove the pages, but the question is: Should I include these pages in the sitemap.xml, or just the important pages? Also should I include them in order to get the changes indexed fastet by Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
No index, or no index no follow?
Wondering if I could garner some views on this issue please. I'm about to add an affiliate store to a website I own, the site has a couple of pages of unique content (blogs, articles, advice etc on home improvement - all written by my team). Obviously, the affiliate store will not be unique content, it will be made using the datafeeds from cj.com et al, and so I don't want to get any duplicate content type penalties from Google for this store. Should I add a no index to the pages and allow the bots to still crawl them, or should I add no index and no follow? Ideally I would like to get the affiliate store category pages indexed as they will be a mixture of lots of different merchants and be fairly unique. Can Google still mark the site down for duplicate content if it can crawl it, even if it is noindex? Thanks, Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Wordpress sitemap url problem causing WMT errors
The following types of links are appearing in my webmaster tools crawl errors report under 'other'. I've noticed they are in my sitemaps ( I run wordpress and use a plugin called Google XML sitemaps). How do I get rid of this error? http://www.musicliveuk.com/bands/postname%/
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Does Google follow link path or url path when it comes to passing link juice
I noticed something with one of my sites and now I am thinking I made a boo boo (I think) here is what I have On my homepage I have 5 links Link1
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich
Link2
Link3
Link4
Link5 Links 1 - 4 go to a page and stops there. So my URL structure is www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4 So naturally my link juice passes down to these links evenly. Link5 also goes to another page, but on that page I have more links that go down further. www.mydomain.com/Link5 -> more links On page Link5 I have links that go to more pages, BUT my URL structure for these pages go like this Lets say on Link5 page I have another link that goes to AnotherLink1, AnotherLink2 and AnotherLink3 When you click on those links it takes you to those pages just fine, BUT my URL structure is like this www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3 Basically I put all the "AnotherLink1-3" in the root directory as well. My question is concerning how Google passes the link Juice from my pages and if it is passing based on the path of the links and how they point to those pages, or do they pass link juice based on the URL structure. So since "AnotherLink1-3" is located in the root directory am I dividing my link juice from my home page to all the links as well based on the URL structure. For instance www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4
www.mydomain.com/Link5
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3 Do I need to change my path for Link5 page to www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink3 ?0 -
Is having this sitemap worthwhile?
I know that a sitemap can help SEs to find and index pages, and also deal with canonicalisation issues, but I have a client who is insisting that we build a sitemap containing links to every possible category on a huge ecommerce site. We already have tabbed modules that allow users to sort by brand, product type, location etc, plus a strong search function that allows them to select multiple options. I'm worried that a sitemap stuffed with keywords like "Product A by brand B in Location C", "Product A by brand B in Location D" etc. will just seem spammy and do more harm than good. Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | gcdtechnologies0 -
What is html text?
I am using the "page attributes" tool for a guideline for what I am filling in on each page of my website. I feel like I've done my homework on this, but I can't figure out what "html text" is. URL Page Title Meta Description Meta Keywords H1 H2 **HTML Text ** ... not sure what to put here, how long it should be, what it's purpose is, etc. Any SEOMoz links helping me figure that out? I'm not finding it in the "Basics of Search Engine Design" article posted here on SEOMoz.
On-Page Optimization | | amandahx20 -
How do we handle sitemaps in robots.txt when multiple domains point to same physical location?
we have www.mysite.net, www.mysite.se, www.mysite.fi and so on. all of these domains point to the same physical location on our webserver, and we replace texts given back to client depending on which domain he/she requested. My problem is this: How do i configure sitemaps in robots.txt when robots.txt is used by multiple domains? If I for instance put the rows Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapNet.xml
On-Page Optimization | | nordicnetproducts
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapSe.xml in robots.txt, would that result in some cross submission error?0