Unique use of nofollow tag

[Murdock_Auto_Group]

Love the community here. I just had a quick question about the using noindex, nofollow. We are a car dealership group that uses a website provider (cobalt). Since they provide the website they are the only ones with access to remove pages etc. We can add pages but only they can remove them. There are some pages we need to have removed but according to them they are unable to remove them, (I think the manufacture might mandate having some pages), anyway some of these pages literally have nothing on them, and there isn't really any useful content we could add to them. So we are using noindex on them to ensure that they stay out of search indices, but I am wondering if we should also use nofollow on them. If I understand nofollow correctly it just means search engines won't follow the links on the page, well for most of these pages the only links on them are the navigation, and since we don't plan on adding any content to these pages and we can't remove them should we use noindex and nofollow as a way to "remove" them from the site as much as we can?

[Murdock_Auto_Group]

Thanks Patrick. So you're saying since they're being noindexed anyway adding nofollow to them is pointless/redundant?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I agree with your noindex move. You can also block them in your robots.txt.

I wouldn't worry too much about the "nofollow" addition. If there are links on the page, you're not going to hurt them since you already noindexed the page they live on. I would, however, remove any reference to those pages in your content, navigation, or internal linking. This could potentially create a bad user experience.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!