Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
-
Hi Mozzers
I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it.
So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes,
I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*.
So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs)
If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt
Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow?
PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks,
Chris Captivate.
-
I'm not a fan of doubling up, but only because it makes the results really hard to measure. If you implement both, you won't know which one worked, ultimately. I'm not sure it's actually harmful - it just can be hard to track.
If you're just trying to prevent future problems (and don't have any immediate issues), I'd probably pick one and give it a few weeks.
-
Hi Dr Pete
Thank you so much for your input, I really appreciate it. Always fun learning something new
I also don't prefer the engine-specific approach. However, could it hurt implementing both solutions?
Regards,
Chris Captivate.
-
A couple of options here. First off, though, there's really no rel="noindex" at the link level. You can "nofollow" a link, and that generally disrupts indexing, but it's not guaranteed. You're right that it can look like PR sculpting, although that's not a huge issue if your usage makes sense. In other words, if you're using rel=nofollow to keep the crawlers away from content with low search value, I generally think that's ok.
You could META noindex, nofollow the target pages, although then Google has to crawl those. The advantage is that I find the META Robots approach to be a bit more powerful.
The other option is to use parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools (Bing has a similar function) to tell Google to ignore the "?filter" parameter. The purist in me doesn't love the engine-specific approach, but it's easier, you don't need to change the site itself, and it typically works fairly well.
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
-
Should I noindex shop page and blog page for SEO?
I have about 15 products in my store. Should I noindex shop and blog page for SEO? The reason I ask this question is because I see someone suggesting noindex archives pages. And the shop page is product archive and blog page is archive too, so should I choose index or noindex? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Helloiamgood0 -
Meta Description Length is Doubling (Like Twitter)
Just saw this: https://imgur.com/a/KQ0Hf This is the first time I have ever seen a meta description that long. Ever. I haven't seen any other sites covering this. That's a 275-character-length description that is not being truncated. Thoughts? I'm freakin' out.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TaylorRHawkins1 -
Title Tag : use comma, pipe or colon (:)
Hi, If Title has two and three keywords then which one is better option to separate them either with comma or pipe or colon. Example : Arvixe Review, Coupons (Jun 2015) and Uptime Report (I used (,) as a separator) Arvixe Review is primary keywords and Coupons and Uptime are secondary keywords. Aim is rank on keywords like Arvixe Review, Arvixe Coupons and Arvixe Uptime.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gamesecure
Also, including current month and year with Title tag and it will change every month. Its means every month our title is changed.
Is this effect in SEO? Suggest best possible title for keywords like Arvixe Review, Coupons (Jun 2015) and Uptime Report. Rajiv0 -
What is the difference between rel canonical and 301's?
Hi Guys I have been told a few times to add the rel canonical tag to my category pages - however every category page actually is different from the other - besides the listings that I have for my staff on each pages. Some of them specialise in areas that cross over in other areas - but over really if I'm re directing for eg: Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships because 5 of my staff members are in both categories - the actual delivering of content and in depth of the actual category which skills are provided at different levels don't justify me creating a rel tag from Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships just because i have 5 staff members listed under both categories. Tell me have I got this right or completely wrong? Here is an eg: Psychic Readings category https://www.zenory.com/psychic-readings And love and relationships category - https://www.zenory.com/love-relationships Hope this makes sense - I really look forward to your guys feedback! Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Hidden H1 Tags
I am trying to triple check this - I have a client who has all of their H1 tags as hidden. As far as I am concerned, anything hidden is not a good thing for SEO. I am debating with their online store provider that this is not good practice. Everything I am reading says it is not good practice. They are saying it is for "My SEO experience would suggest otherwise. In addition, the H1 adds semantic value for users with disabilities to help give them context with what the content of the page is." Did I miss something? They are a large brand and have not been penalized. This has been happening for 8 months.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smulto0 -
Rel Canonical and Rel No Index, Follow
Hi, Cant implement rel next and prev as getting difficulty in coding - tried lot for same, but to no luck... Considering now rel=canonical and rel noindex,follow to 2 sections Deals and Discounts - We have been consistenly ranking on first position for over 1.5 yr, however recently slipped to position 4,5 on many keywords in this section URL - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9 here, the page content for page 1 and 2 pertains to the current month and from page 3 to all other pages pertains to previous months. Is adding up rel canonical from page 3 to last page to page 1 - makes sense & also simultaneously add noindex, follow from page 3 to last page News & Reviews Section - Here, all news & article items are posted. Been the links of news items are primarily there. However, the pages are not duplicates, does adding noindex, follow makes sense here URL - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 Look forward for recommendations to implement the best - to gain SERP, avoid duplicate and white hat method.. Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
SEO best practice: Use tags for SEO purpose? To add or not to add to Sitemap?
Hi Moz community, New to the Moz community and hopefully first post/comment of many to come. I am somewhat new to the industry and have a question that I would like to ask and get your opinions on. It is most likely something that is a very simple answer, but here goes: I have a website that is for a local moving company (so small amounts of traffic and very few pages) that was built on Wordpress... I was told when I first started that I should create tags for some of the cities serviced in the area. I did so and tagged the first blog post to each tag. Turned out to be about 12-15 tags, which in turn created 12-15 additional pages. These tags are listed in the footer area of each page. There are less than 20 pages in the website excluding the tags. Now, I know that each of these pages are showing as duplicate content. To me, this just does not seem like best practices to me. For someone quite new to the industry, what would you suggest I do in order to best deal with this situation. Should I even keep the tags? Should I keep and not index? Should I add/remove from site map? Thanks in advance for any help and I look forward to being a long time member of SEOMoz.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BWrightTLM0 -
Links In Blog Posts: 1 Paragraph VS. Full Article
Hey guys, I've been using an article network to post unique articles (not spun). Been posting 1 paragraph articles with 1 text link. Just wondering what the main difference would be if I were to post a full article with 2 or 3 text links vs 1 paragraph with 1 text link, besides the fact that you get more links and save more time writing only 1 paragraph. Will the full article with 3 backlinks improve keyword ranks more or not by much? Cheers!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | upick-1623910