> BlogYou may have heard some chatter on the web about the ”nofollow” attribute or the “noindex, nofollow” meta tag but you aren’t entirely sure what they are or what they do, here we address these questions.
The What
The rel=”nofollow” attribute is a way of telling Search Engines not to follow a specific link on a page and is applied directly to the link.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> is a meta tag and is applied at page level to tell the Search Engines not to index the page or crawl any of the outgoing links on the page.
The Why
The ‘proper’ use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute is to tell the Search Engines which links on your site not to crawl.
There may be pages on your site that you don’t necessarily want the Search Engines to follow when they enter your site. Login, privacy and terms and conditions pages are a few examples. It is perfectly acceptable to assign a rel=”nofollow” attribute to these (internal) links to prevent this from happening. Be careful here though as assigning rel=”nofollow” attributes to a large majority of your pages can be construed as page sculpting – a method used by some black-hat SEOs to manipulate the internal linking structure of a site to improve Page Rank for particular pages.
If you are (externally) linking out to numerous sites, you need to consider whether or not they are trusted, non-paid links? Do you want to be associated with the content or user comments etc on these sites? And, are they providing a link back to your site? If the answer to both is yes then the nofollow attribute isn’t required. If the answer to both is no then consider applying the nofollow attribute to the link.
The ‘proper’ use of the robots noindex meta tag is to basically tell the Search Engines to ignore that page.
When considering your website architecture you should also think about the types of pages that you don’t want a user to come across when using Search Engines and apply the meta tag to these pages. Again login, privacy and terms and conditions pages are a few examples of when this tag is useful. Without the robots noindex meta tag in place other sites can still link to these pages and they can appear in Search Engine results, so if you don’t want users falling upon these pages you should use this tag and not rely solely on the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
The Where
Firstly, you need to decide if it is just one link you want to prevent from being crawled or whether you want to exclude the whole page from the Search Engine results. Once you know this you can decide which piece of coding to use.
If it’s a specific link then you would apply the rel=”nofollow” attribute at the end of the a href tag e.g.
<a href="http://www.apexinternet.co.nz/page1.php" rel="nofollow">Example Link</a>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
This tells the Search Engines to ignore the link to the page1.php file. If it’s the whole page you want to exclude then the following tag is placed in the section of the code e.g.
If you really aren’t sure if a page or link on your site needs to be excluded from the Search Engines, chances are it probably doesn’t need to be. Try and limit your use of these options and only use them when absolutely necessary.
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