The difference between an noindex and nofollow?
-
What is really the difference between an noindex and nofollow and why/when do you want to use them? Built my first wordpress site and the blog "posts" that make up my home page confuse me....as far as passing link juice to my home url...not sure what I am asking here! How do I use nofollow/noindex or is the issue I should be looking at is 301/canonical. Or neither?
-
Hi Courtney
No you do not just want the home page to get the "link juice" you want the whole site to be visible to the search engines, or at least all the pages and posts that you want people to be able to read for free.
Remember that every word you write on your blog has the chance to send more people to your site, so the more pages you can get Google to index and rank the more chance you have of getting traffic.
I hope this helps
Sean
-
Thanks! Helpful and to the point? Can you do the same for 301 and canonilical? I have watched blog videos, read, etc....what is the simple answer? you are awesome! Thanks...but what about wordpress treating each post on my home page like it's own URL...I just want the home page to get the "link juice" right?
-
Noindex = You are telling Google not to index that page. This is usually not a good thing if you want the content to be found in search engines. If it is a specific page, image or what-not that you don't want indexed by Google use NoIndex. If you want it to be able to be found, don't use it.
Nofollow is used in links. It is telling a search engine that you don't want it to follow the link you are posting. When a link has nofollow attached pagerank or anchor text isn't transferred.
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
-
Noindex PPC landing pages or optimise for SEO?
Organic seems to be down YoY on one of the categories of a large ecommerce website that I work on. This particular category has multiple landing pages set up for PPC consisting of filtered products. So these landing pages are prone to duplicate content due to the products listed. e.g. Blue Thingamajigs White Thingamajigs Black Thingamajigs High Gloss Thingamajigs Oak Thingamajigs Glass Thingamajigs etc These landing pages do well for PPC, but are nowhere to be seen in organic (51+). The main category page however ranks quite well for quite a variety of root and longtail keywords, though not as well as it used to. For example, it does rank for "thingamajigs", "white thingamajigs", "white gloss thingamajigs" and "white gloss thingamajigs with cherries on top". Would it benefit the main category page if the PPC landing pages were noindexed? Or, despite Google's preference for the main category, work on further optimising the landing pages for SEO? Or is there another solution that I'm completely overlooking? (It is a Friday afternoon after all...)
Technical SEO | | Ria_0 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
GWT Malware notification for meta noindex'ed pages ?
I was wondering if GWT will send me Malware notification for pages that are tagged with meta noindex ? EG: I have a site with pages like example.com/indexed/content-1.html
Technical SEO | | Saijo.George
example.com/indexed/content-2.html
example.com/indexed/content-3.html
....
example.com/not-indexed/content-1.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-3.html
.... Here all the pages like the ones below, are tagged with meta noindex and does not show up in search.
example.com/not-indexed/content-1.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-3.html Now one fine day example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html page on the site gets hacked and starts to serve malware, none of the other pages are affected .. Will GWT send me a warning for this ? What if the pages are blocked by Robots.txt instead of meta noindex ? Regard
Saijo UPDATE hope this helps someone else : https://plus.google.com/u/0/109548904802332365989/posts/4m17sUtPyUS0 -
'External nofollow' in a robots meta tag? (advertorial links)
I believe this has never worked? It'd be an easy way of preventing any penalties from Google's recent crackdown on paid links via advertorials. When it's not possible to nofollow each external link individually, what are people doing? Nofollowing and/or noindexing the whole page?
Technical SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW - Any SEO benefit to these pages?
Hi I could use some advice on a site architecture decision. I am developing something akin to an affiliate scheme for my business. However it is not quite as simple as an affliate setup because the products sold through "affiliates" will be slightly different, as a result I intend to run the site from a subdomain of my main domain. I am intending to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW the subdomained site because it will contain huge amounts of duplication from my main site (it is really a subset of the main site with some slightly different functionality in places). I don't really want or need this subdomain site indexed, hence my decision to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW it. However given I will, hopefully, be having lots of people link into the subdomain I am hoping to come up with some sort of arrangement that will mean that my main domain derives some sort of benefit from the linking. They are, after all, votes for my business so they feel like "good links". I am assuming here that a direct link into my NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX subdomain is going to provide ZERO benefit to my main domain. Happy to be corrected! The best I can come up with is to have a "landing page" on my main domain which links into parts of my main domain and then provides a link through to the subdomain site. However this feels like a bad experience from the user's point of view (i.e. land on a page and then have to click to get to the real action) and feels a bit spammy, i.e. I don't really have a good reason for this page other than linking! Equally I could NOINDEX,FOLLOW the homepage of the affiliate site and link back to the main domain from there. However this also feels a bit spammy and would be far less beneficial, I guess, because the subdomain homepage would have many more outgoing links than I envisaged for my "landing page" idea above. Also, it also looks a bit spammy (i.e. why follow the homepage and nofollow everything else?)! The trouble, I guess, is that whatever I do feels a bit spammy. I suppose this is because IT IS spammy! 🙂 Has anyone got any good ideas how I could setup an arrangement like I described above and derive benefit to my main domain without it looking (or being) spammy? I just hate to think of all of those links being wasted (in an SEO sense). Thanks Gary
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660 -
Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow". Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator. Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be... Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Is the same content posted under different international TLDs a problem?
Dear all, I have a site which owns .be, .cn, .biz, .com.mx, .de, .us, .info, .net, .org and all run from the same server and have no difference in content i.e. .com.mx/our-services is the same as .com/our-services Google webmaster help created a video that said multiple international TLDs, same content 'should be ok' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo - however, I would like confirmation from practitioners! What is the best practice in this case? Considering none of the content is customised, should I create root level redirects to our .com, or leave as is? Thanks! Christian watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo
Technical SEO | | ChristianMKTG0