hello! I am coding a wordpress theme, and hoping to have a very good SEO impact. I have a out-bound limiting issues. So here is the situation: Let's say I had 4 different parts of my page: Header.html (Which contains Meta-tags, and the title of the pages for my blog) Body.html (Which contains unique contents, or course all the links and contents here should be do-follow and index) Sidebar.html (Which contains do-follow URLS but must be no-index, since Sidebar will surely be non-info giving, so just let the URLs get the juice) Footer.html (Which contains dynamic keyword for the blog, so the contents here should be index, but URLs must be no-follow since I already have do-follow in my sidebar) Ok, here is my question. At the Header.html Since it will dictate the crawling in my page, which is the correct value for the robot meta-tag? Now, at Body.html what should I do to make the bots do-follow and index all the contents and URLS? In, Sidebar.html what should I do, so that bots will not index the content of this but will let the bot to follow the URLs In Footer.html what should I do, so that bots will index the content but will not follow that URLs here? I am looking forward to a great help. Thanks in advance and more power. GodBless.
You cannot control indexing at the page section (header, footer, sidebar, body) level. The INDEX/NOINDEX attribute is a URL/Page-level attribute... You really can't control the FOLLOW/NOFOLLOW at the page section level either. You can control it at the Page-level or individual Link-level. I would suggest using (which is actually the default if you omit the <meta> robots element) to make the page indexable and followed. Then for any outbound links that you do NOT want followed (like your footer links), simply add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> (anchor) HTML element similar to: If you don't want your sidebar indexed then you can use a Javascript function to render the sidebar. Unfortuately, this will also have the side effect of preventing any links rendered by the Javascript from being followed. You could use multiple Javascript calls to render those portions of sidebar that you don't want indexed, but generate any links you want followed via HTML so the search engines will see them and follow them.
Why can't I give rep to you? Bullshy, I think I can only control the URL following, but the indexing will surely be pain in my ass. Thanks anyway, I am still looking for answers. Thanks.