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Do we believe today that nofollows really drain SEO equity from a website? Or was this something Matt Cutts started to discourage page rank scultping? I defer to greater minds on that. But if so it punishes good practices as well as bad, depending on the context.

We nofollow links not to page rank sculpt but, among other reasons, because we don't want spiders to take that particular route to whatever is behind that link. The nofollow pretends there isn't an href there. For example, our optimization/canonicalization on certain pages doesn't persist when certain links are followed -- so we nofollow those to prevent duplicate content.

Of course it's not always the most efficient way to manage crawling --but we don't worry about losing juice if we feel we need a nofollow.

Diane,

A couple fo things. Google has repeatedly said that they need to see your CSS, so make sure your stylesheets are not blocked in robots.txt. The main reason they want to crawl that is probably spam detection for those of our brethren who might dabble in the dark arts (using CSS to hide SEO text is a classic spam technique). But they'll be able to interpret your CSS just fine.

That said, please have TPTB reconsider using header tags and other proper structural elements. These tags are ultimately there to show how the document is structured -- something search engines are more interested in now than ever before. All you can do to clarify how your site is organized is an SEO plus.

But I agree with my colleagues that neither approach is going to REALLY bump up the keywords in today's SEO landscape.

Bonnie Gibbons, Cars.com

Our blog is part of Google News and is syndicated for use by several of our partners such as Chicago Tribune. Lately, we see the syndicator version of the post appearing in Google News instead of our original version. Ours generally ranks in the regular index. ChiTrib does have canonical URL tags and syndication-source tags pointing to our original. They are meta tags, not link tags.

We do have a News-specific sitemap that is being reported in WMT as error-free. However, it shows no urls indexed in the News module -- even when I can find those specific URLs (our version) in the News.

For an example: Here is a ChiTrib post currently ranking in Google News
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/sns-school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone-20120301,0,3514283.story

The original version is here:
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/03/school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone.html

The News sitemap URL is
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/kickingtires_newsmap.xml

One of our front-end producers is speculating that the Facebook sharing code on ChiTrib is having an effect. Given that FB is FB and Google is Google, that sounds wrong to me when we're talking about specifically Google News.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Yes, but technically (and according to Google's docs) when you robots something out, you are saying "This URL shouldn't be indexed." And if the special page a)lives at the HP URL, or b) is redirected from the HP via 302, you are telling them "please don't index my homepage." The docs say "when we see noindex, we pull the page."

My question really is whether the 307 is any better than the 302. I think I implied above that I saw no difference but with the "only cacheable if" language It looks like it's supposed to be. THEN AGAIN, that same language is in the HTTP1.1 definition of the 302 as well as a 307.

Bbut I'm hoping someone has an example of using one successfully (where success = the temporary content did not get cached in SERPs).

Thanks!

We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.)

Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage.

Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want.

My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302?

307 Temporary Redirect

The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field.

The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI.

If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.

Do we believe today that nofollows really drain SEO equity from a website? Or was this something Matt Cutts started to discourage page rank scultping? I defer to greater minds on that. But if so it punishes good practices as well as bad, depending on the context.

We nofollow links not to page rank sculpt but, among other reasons, because we don't want spiders to take that particular route to whatever is behind that link. The nofollow pretends there isn't an href there. For example, our optimization/canonicalization on certain pages doesn't persist when certain links are followed -- so we nofollow those to prevent duplicate content.

Of course it's not always the most efficient way to manage crawling --but we don't worry about losing juice if we feel we need a nofollow.