I read somewhere once that Matt Cutts kindly commented how some site placed no-follows on all their utility pages. Does anyone here do this? If so, do you also add no-index? And exactly what pages would these be. Faq, Contact, About Us, Affiliate Program? Thanks
I failed to do this on one of my sites and now the Contact page on this site is a PR6, due to the 'meshed' linking scheme used (every page is linked to every other page) and PR distributed from some high PR inner pages. I think that the PR would have been better distributed to more useful pages. Mark
Nope, not yet. Everytime I remember it, I put it down on my list of things to do, but something more important always comes up and I forget about it again. Mark
What I'm really curious about, is if doing this will paint a much clearer/tighter picture about your site in the eyes of google. Comments?
you would only want to use nofollow tag on pages that you would not want to get indexed, some people use nofollow on link pages or other links on the homepage that you would not want to get indexed, some directories are using this now to not allow junk outgoing links.
Here's another problem.... Exactly how does that PR get passed around? When dealing with the no-follow, we may have two possibilites... Lets say we have a page with PR5, with 5 links on that page. Then, we add the no-follow to three of the links. Which will occur... 1) The five PR points get divided up equally to the remaining two links. 2) The remaining two links receive the same PR, and the three extra are just tossed away. Food for thought....
Whoa... I thought the meta tag 'no-index' was to be used for not indexing, and the no-follow was just a mean to not pass link 'juice'. Two different things. Am I wrong?
Well, it looks like I'll be the first to try it here since no one has any real suggestions. What I'm looking at, is a site that was built 'back in the day', so to speak. The site has a 'faq' page, 'about us' page, 'affiliate program' page, etc. Even if a user wanted to read it, none of it really reflects the site obviously, just like most sites utility pages. I'm just curious if no-follow will tighten up the site more for it's keywords. Heck.... does anyone even use those pages anymore?
If you don't want certain noisy pages to be indexed you should block them using robots.txt and nofollow all the links to them. About pages and faq pages are not classed as noisy pages - keep these indexed.
Actually, I don't mind if they're indexed or not. I just want all the link juice to be passed to the pages that REALLY matter... like the home page, the core product pages, etc, and at the same time tighten it up for google on what my site is really about. Example: I have a faq page, and on that page it says I accept credit cards via paypal, blah blah blah. I really don't care about the ranking of this page, nor do I care if G indexes it. But as of right now, the link juice gets spread to it. So, I'm gunna try the no-follow on these pages, and see how it works out. Right now, my rankings have completely tanked anyways, so there isn't a loss there.
I've been playing with this a lot over the last few days, but I still need to wait a bit longer for the results. One other thing I'm tempted to try -- nofollowing all of the links back to my home page. On some of my sites I want the home page to rank well. On one site, though, I want all of the inner pages to rank well. Let me explain. The site is a golf site. It has a couple hundred cities (city.myurl.com), and inside of those are a few thousand golf courses. I want to rank well for "Atlanta golf courses" and "pretty lake golf course", but I know I'll never rank well for any general terms like "golf". Therefore, wouldn't it make sense to nofollow the links back to the homepage so that the link juice keeps going deeper into the site?
You really don't want to start nofollowing links to pages within your own site unless you want to remove them from the index. Trying to hoard your PR and direct it to certain pages is a bad thing to do.
In most cases above, that's fine. People don't want pages indexed. In my case, my homepage will still get a lot of natural inbound links, so it won't be removed from the index. I agree that hoarding PR is bad. However, this thread is just talking about redirecting it. I see those as two different things.
But your homepage is intended to spread PR to your internal pages and to show search engines which are important. Nofollowing links to your homepage will not help you in any way.
Well, for one, I believe 'hording pr' has to do with adding no-follows to link exchanges and/or other types of outbound links, allowing you to keep all the pr that comes in. However, in my (and mickmel's) case, we're trying to tell google what pages are the most important in relation to our keywords. Mickmel, if you no-follow the links to your home page, you'll be losing all the pr from those natural links out there that point to your internal pages. I'm assuming that could work against you as you'll probably want to rank for 'golf' at some time in the future. Not to mention that 'golf' and 'places to golf' are definitely part of your core keywords for your home page. What I'm talking about is adding the no-follow to pages that I need on the site, but don't need to rank for. Example: Under the current set up, my internal page might rank somewhere for 'Online _________ paypal merchant' (fill in the blank for the specific product). This isn't the core purpose of my site. It just happens to be a part of my normal ordering process. What i WANT google to do is completely ignore these pages when it comes to ranking for said terms, but i DO want any outside links pointing to them to pass pr to my core pages that target the specific terms I'm after..... Although, I very highly doubt I'll get any outside links to these pages, but just in case. If I tell G not to index (way different than nofollow), then i'll lose any love I could get from outside links. Follow (er.. nofollow? ) what I mean?
Not really. I don't expect to ever rank well for generic golf terms on my home page. If I can get each course page ranked well enough to get one visitor a day, I'll be doing amazingly well. That being said, I'm still not sure my idea is any good -- just throwing it out there for discussion.
Is the tag: <meta name="robots" content="noarchive,noindex,nofollow"> correct, or does it contain too much information? thanks