That is the question. Should I throw a nofollow tag on it, or do search engines value a policy and legal copy? Thanks in advance, you handsome devil.
Nofolllow it so that your link juice won't flow to that page. So your other pages will get more link juice.
Oh, I had no idea we should block some of our pages, does it make a huge difference? What about FAQ page too?
I don't think we should no follow it because it can increase your total index pages. overall it affects our Search engine ranking.
If it is an unique page - then you can allow search engines to follow/index it. In my case, I use a generic privacy policy (adsense compliant) for my network of sites. Hence use "no-follow" for that particular page in the robots.txt file. [Just becoz of 1 single page being duplicated - Search Engines may assume that your whole site is of duplicate content. No-follow instruction either in meta tag or robots.txt file can help to avoid this.]
ok, if anyone has read mattcutts latest posts? Then you shouldn't really use these nofollow tags for internal links. if you want to disallow a page, then use robots.txt, if you have 20 nofollows on a page you still lost 20 so called page rank juice, but none is passed to the landing page. This is to cut down page rank sculpting! Take a look at one of his last posts about it
Thank you guys for this post.. I was confused over whether I should include a disallow or what? cleared it right up! ah, the power of DP
Thanks to Ste-HitSearch, I didn't even know if it's better disallowing from robots.txt instead of nofollowing it.
No need. You can make them as nofollow, noindex and also you can restrict with robots.txt to avoid crawling. Avoid unwanted pages from crawling.
Preventing Your Privacy Policy Page From Being Indexed: Placing a rel="nofollow" link on all of your internal links to your privacy policy page has NEVER prevented that page from being indexed. It simply prevents Google from discovering your privacy policy page via your internal links. For example, if every link on your site to your privacy policy page has a rel="nofollow" link on it but another external site had a followed link on it to your privacy policy page, it could still get indexed. Google could discover and index your page by crawling the page on the external site that links to your privacy policy page and subsequently index your privacy policy page. There are basically two ways to prevent your privacy policy page from being indexed: 1) Add a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> element to the <head> of your privacy policy page. 2) Add the following to your robots.txt User-agent: * Disallow: /legal/privacy.html assuming your privacy policy page lives at http://www.example.com/legal/privacy.html. NOTE: Either one of these is equally effective. There is no difference in the end. Both will prevent the page from being indexed. How the rel="nofollow" Attribute on an Anchor (<a>) Element Affects the Flow of Page Rank: When blogs became popular, spammers immediately saw commenting on other sites' blogs as an easy way of farming back links. They began abusing blog comments to manipulate the SERPs. So Google and other engines came up with a new rel="nofollow" attribute to add to an anchor (<a>) element to combat the spam. From the time that the rel="nofollow" attribute was invented to fight spam, Google has always said that it would do several things: 1) Prevent the target URL of the nofollowed link from getting credit for the link 2) Prevent the flow of PR to the target URL of the nofollowed link Soon after, SEOs discovered an opportunity to use this rel="nofollow" attribute as a way to funnel PR to the more important pages on their site rather than waste the PR on less important pages like privacy policy pages, terms and condition pages, etc. They figured out that Google was dividing up the PR that would have been passed to the nofollowed links over the remaining followed links. The "art" of PR Sculpting was born. Matt Cutts and others at Google confirmed that it worked, but downplayed the usefulness of PR Sculpting as an SEO technique. It worked, but it required nofollowing a large percentage of outbound links on a page to make a noticable difference. If you could nofollow half of the outbound links on a page you would essentially double the PR passed out on each of the remaining followed outbound links. But if your page had 100 outbound links and you only nofollowed 10 of them, the remaining 90 followed outbound links would be passed approximately 1/90th (0.01111...) of the PR of the page instead of 1/100th (0.01) of the page's PR prior to nofollowing the 10 links. So nofollowing 10 links on a page w/ 100 outbound links only increases the PR passed to the remaining 90 links by about 1/10th of 1 percent. Not a lot... and since everyone here knows that PR is NOT that influential in your rankings and the effects are even smaller once figured into the over algorithm. Well... Just recently Matt Cutts made it known that Google secretly changed how rel="nofollow" works about a year ago. Check out what he says in the paragraph just before the first Question & Answer: Now when you nofollow a link, the PR that would have been passed out on that link is now thrown away... it goes into a blackhole... it's wasted. It is no longer divided up over the remaining followed outbound links as it was in the past. The rel="nofollow" attribute will still: 1) Prevent the target URL of the nofollowed link from getting credit for the link 2) Prevent the flow of PR to the target URL of the nofollowed link But it will no longer increase the amount of PR passed out on the followed links on the same page.