NOINDEX or NOINDEX,FOLLOW
-
Currently we employ this tag on pages we want to keep out of the index but want link juice to flow through them:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
Is the tag above the same as:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
Or should we be specifying the "FOLLOW" in our tag?
-
Hello again,
They are the same.
And I assume that interpretation is the same because default state is:
**<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL"> **that means index, follow
and you can decompose every tag to parts:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="FOLLOW">
and that tells robot to noindex, but do follow is default so if you don't use this tag robot will follow anyway.
Marek:-)
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html
-
Thank you for your reply. I think you may have misunderstood my question a little. I was asking if...
This tag:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
is the same as this tag:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
?
-
Hi Peter,
Read an Google article first: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
and then you can read http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
Take in the consideration that many robots especially malware simply can ignore that tag. So on the end your site can appear in SERP's despite you use "noindex". More information about indexing: http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/indexing.html
When you think about googlebot it respects "noindex" tag. The best place to tag is section. Make sure that your robots.txt doesn't block a robots
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
block all robots to enter the site, so you can use:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
more: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
Take Care
Marek
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can adding "noindex" help with quality penalizations?
Hello Moz fellows, I have another question about content quality and Panda related penalization. I was wondering this: If I have an entire section of my site that has been penalized due to thin content, can adding "noindex,follow" to all pages belonging to that section help de-penalizing the rest of the site in the short term, while we work to improve those penalized pages, which is going to take a long time? Can that be considered a "short term solution" to improve the overall site scoring on Google index while we work to improve those penalized pages, and, once ready, we remove the "noindex" tag? I am eager to know your thoughts on this possible strategy. Thank you in advance to everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Noindex / Nofollow multiple reviews pages?
I have well over a hundred pages of reviews (10 per page). I know this is solid content and I'd hate to not be able to leverage it, but I'm running into the issue of having duplicate title tags and H1s on all of the pages. What's the best way to make use of the review content without have those types of issues? Is a noindex / nofollow strategy something I should be considering here for Page 2 and beyond? Thanks! Edit: I did additional digging into pagination strategies and found this terrific article on Moz. I'm thinking it should address my questions regarding review pages as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_Mac0 -
Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?
Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Is ok to add 'no follow' to every outbound link?
How do you handle outbound links from your site?.. do you no follow them all to be on the safe side?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
To follow or nofollow paid internal links?
I am having an internal debate on the need to use nofollow tags on sponsored internal links that link to internal pages. One thought is based on this Matt Cutts video (Should internal links use rel="nofollow"?) in which he says that there is never a need to use a nofollow tag on an internal link. The other school of thought is that paid links with follow tags are a violation of Google policy and it does not matter if they link internally or externally. Matt was just not thinking of this scenario in his short video. Would love to hear if anyone has had any manual action from Google based on their internal links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Crawl Budget on Noindex Follow
We have a list of crawled product search pages where pagination on Page 1 is indexed and crawled and page 2 and onward is noindex, noarchive follow as we want the links followed to the Product Pages themselves. (All product Pages have canonicals and unique URLs) Orr search results will be increasing the sets, and thus Google will have more links to follow on our wesbite although they all will be noindex pages. will this impact our carwl budget and additionally have impact to our rankings? Page 1 - Crawled Indexed and Followed Page 2 onward - Crawled No-index No-Archive Followed Thoughts? Thanks, Phil G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Blog links - follow or nofollow?
I need my memory refreshed here! Say, I've got a blog and some of the posts have links to recommended external sites and content. Should these be nofollowed? They're not paid links or anything like that, simply things relevant to the post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0