Noindex
-
I have been reading a lot of conflicting information on the Link Juice ramifications of using "NoIndex". Can I get some advice for the following situation?
1. I have pages that I do not want indexed on my site. They are lead conversion pages. Just about every page on my site has links to them. If I just apply a standard link, those pages will get a ton of Link Juice that I'd like to allocate to other pages.
2. If I use "nofollow", the pages won't rank, but the link juice evaporates. I get that. I won't use "nofollow"
3. I have read that "noindex, follow" will block the pages in the SERPs, but will pass Link Juice to them. I don't think that I want this either. If I "dead end" the lead form with no navigation or links, will the juice be locked up on the page?
4. I assume that I should block the pages in robots.txt
In order to keep the pages out of the SERPs, and conserve Link Juice, what should I do? Can someone please give me a step by step process with the reasoning for what I should do here?
-
I have a private/login site where all pages are noindex, nofollow. Can I still monitor external site links with Google Analytics?
-
Yes, there is a way to keep them out of the SERPs and restrict them from getting link juice: using noindex + nofollow, but bare in mind you'll be loosing that link juice and impairing it's flow throughout your site, besides indicating Google that you don't "trust" those pages.
A workaround would be consolidating those links.
-
So what you are saying is that there is no way to keep the pages out of the serps and restrict them from getting link juice?
This is nuts. My conversion pages will be getting huge amounts of link juice - there are links to them on every page.
I'm not happy about this. Any workarounds?
-
Using robots.txt won't ensure that your pages are kept out of the SERPs, since any external link to those pages could get them indexed. If you need to make sure, the best way should be the noindex meta tag.
Now, in order not to loose your linkjuice, you should make sure to use "noindex, follow" in your meta, that way you're still preventing the pages from being indexed but you are allowing the juice flow through them.
If you want to pass the less possible juice to those pages, you should try to link them as little as possible or consolidate those links in fewer pages throughout your site.
Here's some useful information on the subject:
Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow
Link Consolidation: The New PageRank Sculpting
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
-
Sanity Check: NoIndexing a Boatload of URLs
Hi, I'm working with a Shopify site that has about 10x more URLs in Google's index than it really ought to. This equals thousands of urls bloating the index. Shopify makes it super easy to make endless new collections of products, where none of the new collections has any new content... just a new mix of products. Over time, this makes for a ton of duplicate content. My response, aside from making other new/unique content, is to select some choice collections with KW/topic opportunities in organic and add unique content to those pages. At the same time, noindexing the other 90% of excess collections pages. The thing is there's evidently no method that I could find of just uploading a list of urls to Shopify to tag noindex. And, it's too time consuming to do this one url at a time, so I wrote a little script to add a noindex tag (not nofollow) to pages that share various identical title tags, since many of them do. This saves some time, but I have to be careful to not inadvertently noindex a page I want to keep. Here are my questions: Is this what you would do? To me it seems a little crazy that I have to do this by title tag, although faster than one at a time. Would you follow it up with a deindex request (one url at a time) with Google or just let Google figure it out over time? Are there any potential negative side effects from noindexing 90% of what Google is already aware of? Any additional ideas? Thanks! Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Syndicated content with meta robots 'noindex, nofollow': safe?
Hello, I manage, with a dedicated team, the development of a big news portal, with thousands of unique articles. To expand our audiences, we syndicate content to a number of partner websites. They can publish some of our articles, as long as (1) they put a rel=canonical in their duplicated article, pointing to our original article OR (2) they put a meta robots 'noindex, follow' in their duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. A new prospect, to partner with with us, wants to follow a different path: republish the articles with a meta robots 'noindex, nofollow' in each duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. This is because he doesn't want to pass pagerank/link authority to our website (as it is not explicitly included in the contract). In terms of visibility we'd have some advantages with this partnership (even without link authority to our site) so I would accept. My question is: considering that the partner website is much authoritative than ours, could this approach damage in some way the ranking of our articles? I know that the duplicated articles published on the partner website wouldn't be indexed (because of the meta robots noindex, nofollow). But Google crawler could still reach them. And, since they have no rel=canonical and the link to our original article wouldn't be followed, I don't know if this may cause confusion about the original source of the articles. In your opinion, is this approach safe from an SEO point of view? Do we have to take some measures to protect our content? Hope I explained myself well, any help would be very appreciated, Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fabio80
Fab0 -
Noindex search pages?
Is it best to noindex search results pages, exclude them using robots.txt, or both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Should we NOINDEX NOFOLLOW canonical pages?
Hi, I was window shopping at Gemvara and noticed something interesting... They rank very high for long-tail phrases such as "rose gold engagement rings" and in their pagination pages for that category not only they filled canonical to the main category page (which is logic) but also they "NOINDEX NOFOLLOW" the pages... Is that recommended? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
I want to put 65.000 productpages on NOINDEX, FOLLW at once! Would Google mind?
Or have we do this step by step, i.e: 13.000 pages on noindex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
13.000 pages on noindex
13.000 pages on noindex
13.000 pages on noindex
13.000 pages on noindex Makes together: 65.000 pages0 -
Meta NOINDEX... how long before Google drops dupe pages?
Hi, I have a lot of near dupe content caused by URL params - so I have applied: How long will it take for this to take effect? It's been over a week now, I have done some removal with GWT removal tool, but still no major indexed pages dropped. Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Why should I add URL parameters where Meta Robots NOINDEX available?
Today, I have checked Bing webmaster tools and come to know about Ignore URL parameters. Bing webmaster tools shows me certain parameters for URLs where I have added META Robots with NOINDEX FOLLOW syntax. I can see canopy_search_fabric parameter in suggested section. It's due to following kind or URLs. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1728 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1729 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1730 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=2239 But, I have added META Robots NOINDEX Follow to disallow crawling. So, why should it happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0