Meta-robots Nofollow
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I don't understand Meta-robots Nofollow. Wordpress has my homepage set to this according to SEOMoz tool.
Is this really bad?
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Hi Paul
Many thanks for the swift reply, much appreciated.
I will check why the nofollow was originally added, but as you say by removing it from the pages will allow it to pass the juice onto other internal pages. Point taken re your last comment.
All the best.
Richard
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Without seeing the page, I can't say for sure why it was no-followed, Richard, but if it's just because of the presence of an external link on the page, then absolutely, you should remove the no-follow from the header.
I'd also recommend against a no-follow on the external link itself as well, unless it meets one of the two usual no-follow criteria: either it's a link arising from a commercial relationship (e.g. paid), or it's an untrusted link (e.g. from a user-generated review or comment).
If it doesn't meet one of these two criteria, it should be left as a regular followed link. Search engines tend to look a little cross-eyed at sites that no-follow what should be regular links, as it's not a natural action.
And note - no-following links doesn't preserve link juice for the other links on the page. That's an out-dated concept from a couple years ago.
Make sense?
Paul
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Hi Paul,
Can I ask a related question,
I am looking at a page within a website, it has this
I think the page has the nofollow as it contains a single link to an external website.
Would it be better to have the nofollow on the specific external link rather on the page?
Many thanks!
Richard
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It could very well have been set in a SEO plugin, Pat.
If it's referencing a meta-robots nofollow, that was likely set in the actual header of the page, not in the robots.txt file.
It's easy enough to check. You can look for it in the header of your page by navigating to the page in your browser, then right-clicking in the page and selecting "View Page Source". Then look in the header section for "nofollow" in the meta tags at the top of the page. You can also make sure it's not in your robots.txt file by just navigating to www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
Hope that helps.
Paul
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Thanks Paul.
Think it may be because it was a wordpress site in development and I had the SEO plugin set to no-follow. Pushed it live and I think that was still the case.
Waiting to see what turns up in next crawl. Where is that set? in robots.txt?
Appreciate the response.
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Yes this is really bad. in fact it's deadly for the ranking of your website. With this setting in place, your website is telling the Search Engines not to make any effort to travel through the rest of the pages of your website, and therefore won't be able to add them their index. In addition, none of the authority value of your home page is being passed along to the other pages of the site. This means very little traffic from organic search.
Some of your other pages may get listed by virtue of having incoming links from other sites, but you are giving yourself a massive handicap by having this setting in place. And there's absolutely no reason I can think of why you'd want to keep it in place.
Sounds to me like a glitch when the site was being set up, and it needs to be corrected pronto.
Paul
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