To noindex and follow or noindex no follow?
-
We have to greatly scale back on one of our services and focus on the other more successful ones. I need to figure out what to do with all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back.
Just to be clear, we aren't getting rid of the service. So they still want the pages on the website, but it is better for us to have more link juice going to the other service pages, more of our content ratio to be around the more profitable services, etc.
So, should I no-index/no-follow all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back on? Or should I no-index/follow all the pages relating the service we are cutting back on?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
+1 for EGOL
I would play with the pricing strategy instead of using noindex and nofollow on my site. These unwanted service pages might have valuable Page Authority and pass link juice in internal navigation, so noindex and nofollow can potentially hurt the overall organic search performance of your site.
If you don't want Google to crawl these pages looking for new information, simply block crawling in robots.txt but leave them in Google's index.
-
If I have a limited supply of an item, I raise prices so that I make a maximum amount from the stock on hand. I do the same if I am selling a service that is billed by the hour or by the job and I need to limit its availability. I allow the customer to decide if they want what I have at the price I want to receive.
If I have other products that are close to what I am short on, I will remove the short supply product from the category page competition. That will allow people on my site to see comparable products, but anyone who is searching for that product by name might still find my item in search. For that reason, I would allow one or two links to those pages on the site, but not give that item a "noindex".
The above are pricing plays.
For SEO plays, limiting the number of links that enter the pages that are in limited supply will allow pagerank that originally went into them to flow to other pages. This was very effective ten years ago when pagerank flow was important. Today there are a lot of other items in the algo and on-site connectivity to a page is not as important. However, cutting down the internal links into a page still might be slightly valuable.
-
I would think no-index/no-follow would make the most sense in this case.
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
-
Should I noindex WooCommerce subcategories?
What's the best practice these days for handling indexing of WooCommerce product subcategories? Example: in the sitemap we have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | btetrault
/product-category-a/
/product-category-a/subcategory-1/
/product-category-a/subcategory-2/
etc. Should the /subcategory-*/ be noindexed, canonical to parent, or stay as indexed? Thanks!2 -
Footer no follow links
Just interested to know when putting links at the foot of the site some people use no-follow tags. I'm thinking about internal pages and social networks. Is this still necessary or is it an old-fashioned idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
To No Follow, or to Not No Follow?
So one of the big issues facing my website is that Moz seems to be picking up all of the ''Search'' and ''Tag'' pages, which is causing duplicate content. I cannot see any use for Google to index these pages, so is it better to create a No-Follow rule specific to Search and Tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Stock lists - follow of nofollow?
a bit of a catch 22 position here that i could use some advice on please! We look after a few Car dealership sites that have daily (some 3 times a day) stock feeds that add and remove cars form the site, which in turn removes/creates pages for each vehicle. We all know how much search engines like sites that have content that is updated regularly but the frequency it happens on our sites means we are left with lots of indexed pages that are no longer there. now my question is should i nofollow/disallow robots on all the pages that are for the details of the vehicles meaning the list pages will still be updated daily for "new content" or allow google to index everything and manage the errors to redirect to relevant pages? is there a "best practice" way to do this or is it really personal preference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben_dpp0 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
Noindex, rel=cannonical, or no worries?
Hello, SEO pros, We need your help with a case ↓ Introduction: Our website allows individual contractors to create a webpage where they can show what services they offer, write something about themselves and show their previous projects in pictures. All the professions and services assigned accordingly are already in our system, so users need to pick a profession and mark all services they provide or suggest those which we missed to add. We have created unique URLs for all the professions and services. We have internal search field and use a autocomplete to direct users to the right page. **Example: ** PROFESSION Carpenter (URL: /carpenters ) SERVICES Decking (URL: /carpenters/decking) Kitchens (URL: /carpenters/kitchens) Flooring and staircases (URL: /carpenters/flooring-and-staircases) Door trimming (URL: /carpenters/door-trimming) Lock fitting (URL: /carpenters/lock-fitting) Problem We want to be found by Google search on all the services and give a searchers a list of all carpenters in our database who can provide a service they want to find. We give 15 contractors per page and rank them by recommendations provided by their clients. Our concern is that our results pages may be marked as duplicate since some of them give the same list of carpenters. All the best 15 carpenters offer door-trimming and lock-fitting. So, all the same 15 are shown in /carpenters, /carpenters/lock-fitting, /carpenters/door-trimming. We don't want to be marked as spammers and loose points on domain trust, however we believe we give quality content since we gave what the searchers want to find - contractors, who offer what they need. **Solution? ** Noindex all service pages to avoid duplicate content indexed by Google OR rel=canonical tag on service pages to redirect to profession page. e.g. on /carpenters/lock-fitting page make a tag rel=canonical to /carpenters. OR no worries, allow Google index all the professions and services pages. Benefits of indexing it all (around 2500 additional pages with different keywords) is greater than ttagging service pages with no index or rel=canonical and loosing the opportunities to get more traffic by service titles. We need a solution which would be the best for our organic traffic 🙂 Many thanks for your precious time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | osvaldas0 -
Do Follow and No Follow Attributes?
I have a blog on Trulia and Active Rain which are real estate websites. I see that they both are Do Follow. My question is how much link juice do these sites pass a long to my site when I write a blog post on these sites and create a link to my main site? I've heard somewhere that even though a link has a Do Follow attribute it passes little link juice in certain cases like a no follow attribute. Also, if a link is a No Follow link, does it still pass along some link juice or is it completely juiceless. Is there a way to see which sites pass the most link juice to my site? Thanks all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad1 -
1200 pages no followed and blocked by robots on my site. Is that normal?
Hi, I've got a bunch of notices saying almost 1200 pages are no-followed and blocked by robots. They appear to be comments and other random pages. Not the actual domain and static content pages. Still seems a little odd. The site is www.jobshadow.com. Any idea why I'd have all these notices? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110