Meta-robots Nofollow
-
I don't understand Meta-robots Nofollow. Wordpress has my homepage set to this according to SEOMoz tool.
Is this really bad?
-
Hi Paul
Many thanks for the swift reply, much appreciated.
I will check why the nofollow was originally added, but as you say by removing it from the pages will allow it to pass the juice onto other internal pages. Point taken re your last comment.
All the best.
Richard
-
Without seeing the page, I can't say for sure why it was no-followed, Richard, but if it's just because of the presence of an external link on the page, then absolutely, you should remove the no-follow from the header.
I'd also recommend against a no-follow on the external link itself as well, unless it meets one of the two usual no-follow criteria: either it's a link arising from a commercial relationship (e.g. paid), or it's an untrusted link (e.g. from a user-generated review or comment).
If it doesn't meet one of these two criteria, it should be left as a regular followed link. Search engines tend to look a little cross-eyed at sites that no-follow what should be regular links, as it's not a natural action.
And note - no-following links doesn't preserve link juice for the other links on the page. That's an out-dated concept from a couple years ago.
Make sense?
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
Can I ask a related question,
I am looking at a page within a website, it has this
I think the page has the nofollow as it contains a single link to an external website.
Would it be better to have the nofollow on the specific external link rather on the page?
Many thanks!
Richard
-
It could very well have been set in a SEO plugin, Pat.
If it's referencing a meta-robots nofollow, that was likely set in the actual header of the page, not in the robots.txt file.
It's easy enough to check. You can look for it in the header of your page by navigating to the page in your browser, then right-clicking in the page and selecting "View Page Source". Then look in the header section for "nofollow" in the meta tags at the top of the page. You can also make sure it's not in your robots.txt file by just navigating to www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
Hope that helps.
Paul
-
Thanks Paul.
Think it may be because it was a wordpress site in development and I had the SEO plugin set to no-follow. Pushed it live and I think that was still the case.
Waiting to see what turns up in next crawl. Where is that set? in robots.txt?
Appreciate the response.
-
Yes this is really bad. in fact it's deadly for the ranking of your website. With this setting in place, your website is telling the Search Engines not to make any effort to travel through the rest of the pages of your website, and therefore won't be able to add them their index. In addition, none of the authority value of your home page is being passed along to the other pages of the site. This means very little traffic from organic search.
Some of your other pages may get listed by virtue of having incoming links from other sites, but you are giving yourself a massive handicap by having this setting in place. And there's absolutely no reason I can think of why you'd want to keep it in place.
Sounds to me like a glitch when the site was being set up, and it needs to be corrected pronto.
Paul
<object id="plugin0" style="position: absolute; z-index: 1000;" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-dgnria"><param name="tabId" value="ff-tab-21"> <param name="counter" value="331"></object>
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
-
If you use canonicals do the meta descriptions need to be different?
For example, we have 3 different subsites with the same pages. We will put canonicals so they reference the main pages. Do the meta descriptions have to be different for each of the three pages? How does Google handle meta data when using canonicals?
Technical SEO | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
My Home Page meta title on Google isn't what it should be
Hey guys My website is http://www.oxfordmeetsfifth.com According to SEOcentro, my website should appear to Google as Fashion Tips for Women | Oxford Meets Fifth. I have used the Yoast plugin and force rewrote titles to ensure that is the home page meta title. It also appears correctly in browser. Could anyone advise why this is the case? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | OxfordMeetsFifth0 -
Reciprocal links and nofollow tag
What happens if I link to a site using the nofollow tag and they are linking back to me with a dofollow link? Will it give me as much power and link juice as if it was a one way link (to me) or will Google discount the link because it's reciprocal?
Technical SEO | | Livet0 -
Confirming Robots.txt code deep Directories
Just want to make sure I understand exactly what I am doing If I place this in my Robots.txt Disallow: /root/this/that By doing this I want to make sure that I am ONLY blocking the directory /that/ and anything in front of that. I want to make sure that /root/this/ still stays in the index, its just the that directory I want gone. Am I correct in understanding this?
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0 -
Robot.txt pattern matching
Hola fellow SEO peoples! Site: http://www.sierratradingpost.com robot: http://www.sierratradingpost.com/robots.txt Please see the following line: Disallow: /keycodebypid~* We are trying to block URLs like this: http://www.sierratradingpost.com/keycodebypid~8855/for-the-home~d~3/kitchen~d~24/ but we still find them in the Google index. 1. we are not sure if we need to specify the robot to use pattern matching. 2. we are not sure if the format is correct. Should we use Disallow: /keycodebypid*/ or /*keycodebypid/ or even /*keycodebypid~/? What is even more confusing is that the meta robot command line says "noindex" - yet they still show up. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" /> Thank you!
Technical SEO | | STPseo0 -
Meta refresh = 0 seconds
For a number of reasons I'm confined to having to do a client side redirect for html pages. Am I right in thinking that Google treats zero seconds roughly the same as proper 301 redirects? Anyone have experience with zero second meta refresh redirects, good or bad?
Technical SEO | | dvansant0