Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?

[jim_shook]

I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following:

The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site.

I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed.

What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed?

My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly.

Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...

[jim_shook]

Thanks Jesse.

Yup, each page is unique, so probably will be no-indexing and putting some no-follows on those links.

Might be worth blocking the /view directory as well, though probably will just start with the noindex. Thanks for the help.

[jesse-landry]

Each article's view pages are unique? Or are they all one page with uniquely propagated iframes? If it's one page, then add it to your robots.txt file as a disallowed page.

Otherwise yes you can no-index

OR you can add a rel="nofollow" to the links which might be a good idea anyway. Of course if the page is linked from anywhere else it could be indexed.

Or you could send them all to a unique directory and have that particular directory removed in the robots file. This would pertain if each article was given a unique page. Just have them go to url.com/article/view/thisarticle.html and disallow the view/ directory.

Hope this helps.