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
-
Blogger to Wordpress 301 and Meta Refresher Redirect
Hi Everyone! So my client has a blogger that she has developed a good amount of link equity for. It is a hersite.blogspot.com (she doesn't own her own domain yet). She is moving to the Wordpress platform though and the only way we can do a redirect is through a meta refresh redirect (since she doesn't have access to the servers on blogger). I went to Google Webmasters to do a change of address and found that the 301 checker said it couldn't find any 301 redirect, which is disappointing. What we're planning is telling all the places that link to the blog to change their links to the new blog but other than that what does anyone recommend to keep this link strength? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
Pages with different content and meta description marked as duplicate content
I am running into an issue where I have pages with completely different body and meta description but they are still being marked as having the same content (Duplicate Page Content error). What am I missing here? Examples: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/what-to-expect-in-the-summer-internship
Technical SEO | | WallStreetOasis.com
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/something-ventured http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/im-in-the-long-run
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/image/jhjpeg0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Robots.txt usage
Hey Guys, I am about make an important improvement to our site's robots.txt we have large number of properties on our site and we have different views for them. List, gallery and map view. By default list view shows up and user can navigate through gallery view. We donot want gallery pages to get indexed and want to save our crawl budget for more important pages. this is one example of our site: http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm When you click on "gallery view" URL of this site will remain same in your address bar: but when you mouse over the "gallery view" tab it will show you URL with parameter "view=g". there are number of parameters: "view=g, view=l and view=m". http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=l http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=g http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=m Now my question is: I If restrict bots by adding "Disallow: ?view=" in our robots.txt will it effect the list view too? Will be very thankful if yo look into this for us. Many thanks Hassan I will test this on some other site within our network too before putting it to important one's. to measure the impact but will be waiting for your recommendations. Thanks
Technical SEO | | holidayseo0 -
How does robots.txt affect aliased domains?
Several of my sites are aliased (hosted in subdirectories off the root domain on a single hosting account, but visible at www.theSubDirectorySite.com) Not ideal, I know, but that's a different issue. I want to block bots from viewing those files that are accessible in subdirectories on the main hosting account, www.RootDomain.com/SubDirectorySite/, and force the bots to look at www.SubDirectorySite.com instead. I utilized the canonical meta tag to point bots away from the sub directory site, but I am wondering what will happen if I use robots.txt to block those files from within the root domain. Will the bots, specifically Google bot, still index the site at its own URL, www.AnotherSite.com even if I've blocked that directory with Disallow: /AnotherSite/ ? THANK YOU!!!
Technical SEO | | michaelj_me0 -
Client accidently blocked entire site with robots.txt for a week
Our client was having a design firm do some website development work for them. The work was done on a staging server that was blocked with a robots.txt to prevent duplicate content issues. Unfortunately, when the design firm made the changes live, they also moved over the robots.txt file, which blocked the good, live site from search for a full week. We saw the error (!) as soon as the latest crawl report came in. The error has been corrected, but... Does anyone have any experience with a snafu like this? Any idea how long it will take for the damage to be reversed and the site to get back in the good graces of the search engines? Are there any steps we should take in the meantime that would help to rectify the situation more quickly? Thanks for all of your help.
Technical SEO | | pixelpointpress0 -
Why is there 4 lines in competitors meta description in SERP?
Hi there, I have noticed several sites now display 4 lines of meta description in Google. Has anyone else seen this? Any help would be appreciated...thoughts? Barry
Technical SEO | | HaymarketMediaGroupLtd0