No follow for html sitemap?

[Bmeisterali]

Hi,

I have been working on an e-commerce site and have been wondering if i should add the meta robot tag with no follows, on pages like delivery , terms, returns and the html sitemap?

From what I have read this seems a good idea, but i am a little confused as what to do with the html sitemap. I can understand that having this on the homepage will allow crawlers quick access to the deeper pages within the site. But would it be better to guide them down the natural route of the category navigation instead?

Thanks

[mjtaylor]

Matt Cutts recommends against using nofollow this way -- now, you might want to take anything Matt says with a grain of salt, but we do know that you cannot control the flow of PageRank in this way. Your other pages will not get more PR because you have nofollowed others; instead Matt says, the PR is lost. See the video

That said, a larger site might benefit indirectly from a judicious use of the robots.txt file to prevent the indexing pf pages that are not likely to end up in the SERPs and allowing more of the site's crawl time allotment for pages that have SERP value.

watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8

[newtraffic]

Basically you'll use the html sitemap for your visitors. The reason for adding no follow to the html sitemap and the other pages is that you would like the link juice not going to pages you have no intention for ranking (being high up in the SERPs).

For the search engine robots you'll need a sitemap.xml file. So in the optimal situation you need two sitemaps. Hope this helps!