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
-
Does Google and Other Search Engine crawl meta tags if we call it using react .js ?
We have a site which is having only one url and all other pages are its components. not different pages. Whichever pages we click it will open show that with react .js . Meta title and meta description also will change accordingly. Will it be good or bad for SEO for using this "react .js" ? Website: http://www.mantistechnologies.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA0 -
Mass Change of Title Tags
Hi All, Does anyone have insight on any repercussions from Google if many title tags are changed at once on a site (we're talking 500 to several thousand)? Appreciate any input. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
Removing duplicated content using only the NOINDEX in large scale (80% of the website).
Hi everyone, I am taking care of the large "news" website (500k pages), which got massive hit from Panda because of the duplicated content (70% was syndicated content). I recommended that all syndicated content should be removed and the website should focus on original, high quallity content. However, this was implemented only partially. All syndicated content is set to NOINDEX (they thing that it is good for user to see standard news + original HQ content). Of course it didn't help at all. No change after months. If I would be Google, I would definitely penalize website that has 80% of the content set to NOINDEX a it is duplicated. I would consider this site "cheating" and not worthy for the user. What do you think about this "theory"? What would you do? Thank you for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lukas_TheCurious0 -
Is there any reason to Nofollow Internal Links or XML Sitemap?
I am viewing a new client's site and they have the following nofollow(S) on their site homepage. Is there a reason for this? Also, they people who originally built their site have a footer link on every page to their company (I guess to promote their work). They didn't "nofollow" that link lol... What are the thoughts on footer links? About Us Privacy Policy Customer Service Shipping & Returns Blog Contact Us Site Map Thanks James Chronicle
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Branded Anchor Text, Exact vs. Non-exact Match Domain
Hello, For NLPCA.com, when you search for "NLP California" in Google,the letters "nlp" are bolded in the SERP URL and so is "ca". See here. This is because "ca" is an abbreviation for "California" Thus, this is not an exact match domain but it is close. What should our branded anchor text be? I want to change the anchor text profile to 98% branded anchor text. The 3 names our company goes by are NLP California NLP Institute of California NLP and Coaching Institute Let me know if we should not use one or more of these names for branded anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Too many nofollowed blog comments with exact anchor text
Back in my dumb days, I decided to use Fiver to get 25 backlinks from .edu sites. Well, they were all nofollowed, and they share space with hundreds of other sites spamming them. Top top it off, all the spam links for my site are exact-match anchor text: embroidered patches. If you look at my link profile in OSE, it looks so polluted with these. I'm just looking for post-Penguin opinions about this--if it has the potential to hurt. Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches, but I am still scared that future algorithm tweaks will incorporate this blog comment spam. What do you think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Google Penguin w/ Meta Keywords
It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed: I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization. If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so? The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot. Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings. I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account. Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Need clarification on what is a landing page vs. doorway page
Hello everyone - I just became a PRO member today and wanted to say hello and ask this question... I am launching a new product, but 6 months before I created 4 different domains with landing pages to "prime" my SEO for the keywords I am trying to pursue. Now that I have launched my new product, it resides on the main domain name (let's call it "MainDomain.com"). Here's my dilemma... I want to create landing pages on each of the different domains for my PPC and optimized organic search traffic. For example, on one of the other domains (let's call it "LandingDomain1.com"), I have created a page to optimize for the keyword "event planning software" and sending my PPC traffic for "event planning software" there as well as my email campaigns. This page has original content that I have written for it (it's not duplicate content used elsewhere), but it also has navigation and links pointing to MainDomain.com, which is where we convert and collect registrations. My question is, will this activity be considered a doorway page even though I'm using it for a landing page for a particular audience? And, if it could be considered a doorway page, would I be better off moving all these optimized landing pages to my MainDomain.com and then doing a 301 redirect from those other domains to the MainDomain.com. Your input is much appreciated ... thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DenverDude1