Unique use of nofollow tag
-
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?
-
Thanks Patrick. So you're saying since they're being noindexed anyway adding nofollow to them is pointless/redundant?
-
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!
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
-
In writing the url, it is better to use the language used by the people of my country or English?
We speak Persian and all people search in Persian on Google. But I read in some sources that the url should be in English. Please tell me which language to use for url writing?
Technical SEO | | ghesta
For example, I brought down two models: 1fb0e134-10dc-4737-904f-bfdf07143a98-image.png https://ghesta.ir/blog/how-to-become-rich/
2)https://ghesta.ir/blog/چگونه-پولدار-شویم/0 -
Deleting Tags Properly - Advice Needed
I have over 18,000 tags. Needless to say, most of them are relatively useless to the user and generate no traffic, while cluttering the site. (I use Wordpress.) My plan is to delete tags, but I want to do so safely as to not accumulate website errors. (Tags pages are noindexed.) What process should I take here? Here was my basic plan (any help is appreciated). 1. Find irrelevant tags that are connected with hardly any posts. 2. Go into the post, and remove said tag. 3. Now, with a tag having a 'count' of 0, I go into Tags, and delete it. Safe, right? But now it seems those tag pages just turned into 404s "Uh-oh...Page not found!" Where do I go from here? Create 410's? Thanks Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Canonical Tags for Legacy Duplicate Content
I've got a lot of duplicate pages, especially products, and some are new but most have been like this for a long time; up to several years. Does it makes sense to use a canonical tag pointing to one master page for each product. Each page is slightly different with a different feature and includes maybe a sentence or two that is unique but everything else is the same.
Technical SEO | | AmberHanson0 -
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Does Canonical Tag Syntax Matter?
Does anyone know definitively if the format of the canonical tag matters? Silly question I know. vs
Technical SEO | | Healio0 -
Using category pages in Wordpress
In our niche we have one main keyword, which represents the entire category. We are using wordpress. I am trying to understand the best URL structure and wonder if the below is a good approach: http://domain.com/keyword This category page will be written to contain an article on the subject. The posts that are put into that category will subsequently appear on this page, below that article. Each of those posts would be targeting a related keyword. e.g. I would write a post which has, as the main target keyword: "MainKeyword training" and another post, which would be targeting "MainKeyword techniques" ... (and so on). Thanks for your advice. Andrew
Technical SEO | | seowhiskey0 -
Canoical tags how do i use them
Hi i have this coming up on the report for my url www.in2town.co.uk but i am not sure how to use the canonical tag. I am using joomla and would be grateful if anyone could please give me advice on how to use this. Canonical URL Tag Usage Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt> <dd>0</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.</dd> <dd>many thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
</dd> </dl>0 -
Should I nofollow search results pages
I have a customer site where you can search for products they sell url format is: domainname/search/keywords/ keywords being what the user has searched for. This means the number of pages can be limitless as the client has over 7500 products. or should I simply rel canonical the search page or simply no follow it?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0