No Follow for MSN??? Do they ignore it?

I put a no follow on my site due to the fact that search engines were adding items to the shopping cart and creating duplication penalities.

FOr example add Blue widgets to cart :add red widgets to cart. 2 identicle pages with different file names as red and blue.

The no Follow tag I put in seems to be working, Google went from having 60000 pages indexed, down to 15000 and still has around 10000 to drop.

But it is not working for MSN, MSN still keeps bypassing the no follow tag and is dropping stuff into the shopping cart.

Any idea how to stop MSN from doing this???? DO they ignore no follow?

 

hmmmm.. i thought they comply with that? hmmm..

 

From what I have observed, MSN does obey nofollow attribute. I haven't noticed them not as of yet.

 

Put a no follow on site. Google dropped all the pages and MSN ignored the no follow and continues to index pages that they should not be.

Do they have their own no follow???

 

maybe try in the robots.txt, might also just take a while

 

If you read the official Google information on nofollow they do claim that both Yahoo and MSN respect the command. Have you tried a situation where MSN has not spidered the pages yet? Does MSN still find the pages with the nofollow?

 

I could be wrong - but suspect the nofollow tag is not related to crawling or indexing. Instead it's to block any value passed from the page through the link.

If you want to block indexing, use a robots.txt file instead.

 

So MSN might ignore the nofollow. Anyone know about Yahoo?

 

They ignore that link, but if there are other links to the page or the page is indexed it may stay. As others have said look into placeing a robots.txt file on your website.

You can also contact google to remove the page from the index. Either way, it will be a slow process.

 

What about the meta nofollow?

 

As far as I know, all major search engines obey nofollow meta tag.

 

All right, thanks for the info.

 

As far as I know all Major search engines obey no follow attribute

 

I think so too! The nofollow tag is used to disallow the passing of information about the link !? But that's more likely an assumption..
Anyway the big 2 search engines always stated they obey these tags.

 

You might want to read the following post from a msn guys posted on January 2005:

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx

 

Maybe they just need some time to update !? have you tried using a robots.txt?

 

You have to write it correctly ...
rel="nofollow"

or

rel="Msn ... please ... you must not follow this link" ...

 

I think either way would work rel="nofollow" as well as rel=nofollow. well at least it works for the other search engines..

 

The quotes would keep it W3C compliant.

 

I have had MSN not follow my "No Follow" , but maybe that is because it already indexed before my "No Follow"