Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site

[theLotter]

For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites.  We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow.

Are there any potential SEO problems here?

What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically.

Thanks!

[theLotter]

It has to be noindex because our development team does not have the capacity to make these websites unique structure/template from our main site.

For example - the main site is www.red.com and the new site will be www.blue.com and the only way to launch www.blue.com is to have it basically be the same site as www.red.com (and it needs to be launched now for legal reasons).

We are also launching localized versions of our website such as www.red.co.uk and are planning on using the canonical tag for these sites.  However, I thought that for the sites with a different URL we could risk having Google see us as a Network since the content will be so similar and traffic flowing in both directions - and this is something important to avoid so in order to use the completely new sites they need to be separate in terms of content, ip, hosting, etc... (and have traffic only flow in one direction).

Do you disagree?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Firstly, why add the no follow tag - let the pages be followed - so if you link back to your parent site, some link juice may flow.

Secondly, I agree with Nigel about the canonical tag. In terms of robots, the no index tag is more effective than blocking the site in robots.txt. You can also implement the no index tag via the http status responses in apache using your .htaccess file - see here for more info

This way you can control this site wide from one location and also it won't be as apparent to anyone who looks at the code of the nonbranded site that it shouldn't be indexed.

Mark

[Richard555]

Hi Sara

If the non branded website is identical to the main website then you could use the canonical tag.This way Google would pass the seo benefit onto the main website.

You could also ensure the robots.txt is used to stop the search engine bots. For more info on this look in your google webmaster tool.

All the best

Nigel

[SoftzSolutions]

_I d not think it would be an issue if your website has unique content even after 1 year. You can then use “Fetch As Google Bot” to speed up the indexing thing [unless Google introduces something else in the meantime]. _