Hi, I have 2 duplicate websites and I put "noindex, nofollow" tag on one. One is for affiliators, and the other is for SEO. I separate them so that I can keep track of my affiliaters activities. Anyway, the thing is the noindex page has page rank4. I think Google still gives page rank for noindex page. I put "noindex nofollow", and the link(s) from this page is not followed, however, if I get rid of "no follow" part (Still noindex) and if I put some links on the page, will Google follow the link and gives PR to the site which get the backlink from it? Thanks
You should always use noindex, follow for pages which have actual traffic - you will never know who is gonna link to your website, so keeping follow on the page will make sure that the page always passes on linkjuice
Im not so sure... But I think if you will remove you nofollow tags on your pages, Page Rank juice will pass to other pages within your website.
What you are proposing is not a very good method IMO of 1) tracking affiliate traffic, 2) trying to allow PR to flow around the duplicate/affiliate tracking site, and/or 3) trying to transfer credit for inbound links from the duplicate/affiliate tracking site to the main site (or even to allow PR to flow around the duplicate/affiliate tracking site). I don't think it will do what you want. I say this because: 1) Maintaining two separate sites would suck. 2) To transfer PR and credit for the inbound links link text from the duplicate/affiliate tracking site's URLs to the same URLs on the main site you have to a) 301 redirect (which throws your affiliate's visitor over to your real site - not what you want) or b) use a <link rel="canonical" href="MainSitesCorrespondingURL"> in the HTML of every URL on the duplicate site. I'm not even sure that the href value in the new canonical <link> element can be used to transfer credit from domain to domain like a 301 can. 3) Additionally, both the referring URL and target of a link has to be indexed for PR to flow and NONE of the duplicate/affiliate tracking sites URLs are indexed so they cannot pass or accept PR. I'm assuming that you're doing this currently on the duplicate/affiliate tracking site using a <meta name="robots"> element. Changing from <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> to <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> WOULD theoretically allow page rank to flow around the duplicate/affiliate tracking site IF the pages were indexed. But page rank is only passed if the URLs being linked from (referring URL) and linked to (target URL of the link) are BOTH in the index. If either the referring URL or the target URL of the link are not indexed, Google does not count the link so no PR is passed. Since NONE of the pages on the duplicate/affiliate site are indexed, NO PR flows around the duplicate/affiliate site if they all have <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. So basically, <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> is equivalent to <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> from the perspective that neither allows PR to be passed out from the non-indexed page. The only thing <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> does is allows the search engine to follow the outbound links on the non-indexed page to discover new pages. It aids in discovery. Period Better Solutions The following two solutions should both allow you eliminate the need to maintain two copies of your site AND to track affiliate conversions AND give the URLs for your main site credit for all inbound links (including those from affiliates and those to the duplicate/affiliate tracking site). Solution 1 - Preferred Method: Why not allow your affiliates to link directly to your main site? Let your affiliates direct traffic to your 'real' site's URLs with an additional query string parameter to identify the affiliate like http://www.realsite.com/somepage.php?affiliateid=123456. You can write a piece of code that runs everytime a page is requested on your main domain. This could be a PHP include file for instance if you're using PHP (or ASP or whatever server side scripting language you're using). You include it at the VERY top of every page so that it is the 1st thing that runs for every page request. This code would need to determine if there are any query string parameters in the requested URL. If there are then look for the affiliateid tracking parameter in the query string. If you find an affiliateid parameter then cookie the value of the affiliateid query string parameter in a session cookie, strip the affiliateid parameter and its value out of the requested URL, and 301 redirect the request to the clean URL http://www.realsite.com/somepage.php. Now your main site's URL (http://www.realsite.com/somepage.php) will get credit for all inbound links and link text including your affiliate links AND you have your affiliate's ID cookied for the duration of the session in case the consumer converts during that session. On conversion always look to see if the session cookie AffiliateID has a value. If it does then give the affiliate credit for the sale. Solution 2 - Less Preferable Method Allow your affiliates to link directly to your main site. Let your affiliates direct traffic to your 'real' site's URLs with one or more additional query string parameters for tracking affiliate activity like http://www.realsite.com/somepage.php?affiliateid=123456. Add a <link rel="canonical" href="MainSitesCleanURL"> to each page on the main site. This way regardless of which URL is used to render the page (i.e regardless of whether it's http://www.realsite.com/somepage.php?affiliateid=123456 or http://www.realsite.com/somepage.php) you always give credit for the inbound links to http://www.realsite.com/somepage.php by including <link rel="canonical" href="/somepage.php">. NOTE: Regardless of whether you use Solution 1 or Solution 2 above, I would 301 redirect every duplicate/affiliate tracking URL to the equivalent main site URL just in case the duplicate/affiliate tracking site has obtained inbound links.
Thanks, Canonical, very much for the detailed answer. There are 2 reasons why I don't use my main site or I don't change to that. One of the rasons is the service I use for getting affiliators is a bit strict about changing the site URL for the service. I need their approval and it takes time. The other reason is Adwords. I don't know if you know about "Google slap" or not, but I got slaped by G and I had to change domains. I no longer use Adwords(YES I'm doing SEO!) but I had to change around the domains and I had to contact the company and so on. It was a while ago so I don't remember exactly how it went but I ended up having 2 sites (domains) for the same product. Anyway, I'll read your advice carefully again, and think if I can work on that. Thanks again.