Hey guys, I've done extensive SEO work on my new site, but when I do SEO checks on my site, or try to create a new site map, a lot of useless links and garbage is being found... For example: In order to find specific things on my site... I have "TAGS" for searching within the site. These tags are linked so you can click on them of course... Now the problem is that when I'm doing a site map, or doing any checks... all these "Final, banana, strawberry, monkey" tags are being listed as individual links (if that makes sense)... so right now my site has 1764 useless links that I just can't shake off... Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
They are showing up because the ARE links. I'm sure if you view the source, you see that each tag link is rendered as <a href="">tagname</a>. Are you using WP? If so you may want to consider using NOFOLLOW on those tag links and/or NOINDEX on the tag pages. My Thesis theme has this option, but I can't remember if it's a Thesis specific option or a WP option off the top of my head. I don't really use sitemaps or sitemap generators for any of my sites, but my guess is that generators crawl your site to generate the sitemap.xml. I would think they would NOT follow any links w/ NOFOLLOW and would not include pages flagged NOINDEX. But I'm not sure. Just an idea.
Hi Canonical, I did tag it with "NoFollow" but it's still showing up... I'm not using WP BTW ... My site is only 27 days old, so basically, I'm trying to do everything right from the get go, so I can start building proper traffic... I use sites domaintools.com to check how many links I have and so on... I didn't put my website address here cause I don't want people to think I'm spamming... In either case, having "No Follow" is good enough? Thanks for your reply
You can put no-follow tag as it is the best way to tell search engines, but If you can do it manually remove those links from SiteMap or code some php to remove those code from SiteMap. Put only those links in SiteMap which are really valuable, don't put tags as it can be found as duplicate content, thus penalising you!
That's exactly what I was afraid off... ok I'll start pruning them by hand... Great advice thank you!