NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW - Any SEO benefit to these pages?
-
Hi
I could use some advice on a site architecture decision. I am developing something akin to an affiliate scheme for my business. However it is not quite as simple as an affliate setup because the products sold through "affiliates" will be slightly different, as a result I intend to run the site from a subdomain of my main domain.
I am intending to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW the subdomained site because it will contain huge amounts of duplication from my main site (it is really a subset of the main site with some slightly different functionality in places). I don't really want or need this subdomain site indexed, hence my decision to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW it.
However given I will, hopefully, be having lots of people link into the subdomain I am hoping to come up with some sort of arrangement that will mean that my main domain derives some sort of benefit from the linking. They are, after all, votes for my business so they feel like "good links". I am assuming here that a direct link into my NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX subdomain is going to provide ZERO benefit to my main domain. Happy to be corrected!
The best I can come up with is to have a "landing page" on my main domain which links into parts of my main domain and then provides a link through to the subdomain site. However this feels like a bad experience from the user's point of view (i.e. land on a page and then have to click to get to the real action) and feels a bit spammy, i.e. I don't really have a good reason for this page other than linking!
Equally I could NOINDEX,FOLLOW the homepage of the affiliate site and link back to the main domain from there. However this also feels a bit spammy and would be far less beneficial, I guess, because the subdomain homepage would have many more outgoing links than I envisaged for my "landing page" idea above. Also, it also looks a bit spammy (i.e. why follow the homepage and nofollow everything else?)!
The trouble, I guess, is that whatever I do feels a bit spammy. I suppose this is because IT IS spammy!
Has anyone got any good ideas how I could setup an arrangement like I described above and derive benefit to my main domain without it looking (or being) spammy? I just hate to think of all of those links being wasted (in an SEO sense).
Thanks
Gary
-
Ha, brilliant.
take care!
-
Would you believe me if I told you I had a brother called Derek? Most don't but it is sadly TRUE! Named before the show, my parents aren't that cruel.
I think we might have just excluded any US readers of this thread!
Have a good day!
-
Ha, no worries, glad it helped. I find I have to let things percolate or just draw them on a big white board. Often, the answer is pretty simple, it's just all too easy to box yourself into a 'I must do it this way' way of thinking when with a little flexibility, things are easy solved.
So, your a Trotter, any relation to Derrick?
-
Thanks Marcus. Today I learnt that I think best in the shower.....
Somtimes it just helps to get the question out there for others to comment - Your responses obviously got me thinking!
Thanks for all for your input!
-
Gary, I think that is spot on, we are telling you how to suck eggs!
-
After a long hot shower, I just thought this one up, how about.....
1.) I give each affiliate/trade user a URL with an affiliate ID on the URL, i.e. ?ID=123 (say) which points at my websites homepage
2.) If a user lands on my site with a URL containing an affiliate ID, the homepage is served up to the user with links that take the user to pages onto the affiliate subdomain site (the homepage that gets served up will be slightly different to the standard homepage). If the user navigates anywhere from this page they end up surfing the subdomain pages (all of which will be NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW).
3.) The "homepage" that gets displayed to the user is always INDEX,FOLLOW and has a rel=canonical tag for the homepage itself.
I "think" that this way my main domain gets the benefit of the links and the users always get the version of the site they are looking for without any extra "spammy" landing pages. Any one see any problems with this?
-
Is that really right? If that was the case presumably Google needs an index of NOINDEX pages or am I way off?
I "site A" gets a link from a NOINDEX page then Google must have some sort of record of that page's "WORTH" (for want of a better word) to attribute some value to "site A". That page's "WORTH" being derived from those pages that link to it.
That suggests to me (and my poor befuddled brain) that NOINDEX means it is indexed it just doesnt show in search results?
-
Thanks for your response. I don't think I can realistically go down the route of rewriting the entire site (the products change every year so it would not be a one-off cost by any means) - I would not get a return on that investment/time. I suppose, if I thought I might then why bother making it an affiliate site?
I agree with "a bit risky or just wouldn't work" - that's why I am asking because I didn't much like my own ideas!
Thanks again.
-
Well, it's true, in SEO, you really can learn something every day, even after ten + years.
I did not think the link value would pass through if the page was not indexed, almost like a cup with a hole, it would not hold the benefit.
-
I agree with Marcus about doing the writing. In the meantime I would NOINDEX, FOLLOW. The FOLLOW will allow pagerank to flow through these pages into the other pages of your site. If you use NOFOLLOW that pagerank is lost.
I have some syndicated content on one of my sites and some thin content that have NOINDEX, FOLLOW.
-
In my mind the best solution here would be to write (or have written) unique content for the sub domains so you could have them indexed, get increased exposure via search and win back links from these sites into the main page.
Anything else would be either a bit risky or just wouldnt work.
Hope that helps
Marcus
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
-
Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
Hi all Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue. I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Any SEO-wizards out there who can tell me why Google isn't following the canonicals on some pages?
Hi, I am banging my head against the wall regarding the website of a costumer: In "duplicate title tags" in GSC I can see that Google is indexing a whole bunch parametres of many of the url's on the page. When I check the rel=canonical tag, everything seems correct. My costumer is the biggest sports retailer in Norway. Their webshop has approximately 20 000 products. Yet they have more than 400 000 pages indexed by Google. So why is Google indexing pages like this? What is missing in this canonical?https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=descWhy isn't Google just cutting off the ?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=desc part of the url?Can it be the canonical-tag itself, or could the problem be somewhere in the CMS? Looking forward to your answers Sigurd
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
How can I provide titles and descriptive text for our list of USPs on the same page optimized both for usability and SEO
I am rebuilding our website together with an agency and I am stuck with the following problem: We have a page which will provide the visitor with a quick and convincing impression why he should chose our enterprise. On this page we want to show our USPs (Unique Selling Points) each with a title and a short description. Now my preferred way of presenting those USPs would be of a list of the titles (which permits to see all USPs without having to read a lot of text) where each title can be clicked to expand the description (in case you want to know more about this specific USP) and if you click on another title the previously clicked title description will collapse and the new description expand and so on (similar to this page: http://www.berlin-city-immobilien.de/38.html - I'm talking about the list in the middle of the page starting with the headline "Dabei profitieren Sie von folgenden Vorteilen"). Since I also want to use these descriptions as on page SEO-texts I checked whether Google might not index or at least value "click to expand content" less than plain text in the body of the page and I stumbled over this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html. According to this article Google will definitely discount the descriptions on my page. Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem? Either by suggesting a different way to show titles and descriptions on the page or maybe by suggesting a workaround so Google will not treat the descriptions as "click to expand text". Thank you already in advance for your input.
Technical SEO | | Benni
Ben0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
How to Delete a Page on the Web?
Google reports and I have confirmed that the following old page is presenting on the Web. http://www.audiobooksonline.com/The_Great_American_Baseball_Box_Greatest_Moments_from_the_Last_80_Years_original_audio_collection_compact_discs.html This page hasn't been in our site's directory for some time and is no longer needed by us. What is the best way to fix this Google reported crawl error?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
Duplicates on the page
Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors0 -
TO NOFOLLOW OR NOT
Hey Everyone... Just got a quick question I haven't really ever found a straight answer to. I have a sports blog. Part of the blog is writing my own articles and the other part is putting together posts that have a collection of links to other good articles. An example post link is below. http://frogfanreport.com/tcu-news/frog-fan-tcu-news-links-1612/ The question is whether I should be setting these posts as NOFOLLOW? During football season I have a link collection post daily but during the off-season i may post every couple of days. zach
Technical SEO | | TCUFrogFanReport0