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
-
Should i noindex/nofollow a faceted navigation page?
I have an ecommerce website with 4 departments, that share the same categories, For example a bicycle shop would have different products for mountain biking and road cycling, but they would both share the same 'tyres' category. I get around this by having the department as a filter, that changes the products on show, and adds a URL parameter of ?department=1. When this filter is applied, i have a canonical link setup to the non-filtered category. Any filter links are nofollowed. My top menu has 4 different sections, one for each department, and links to these URLs with the department parameter already on, these links are set to allow robots to follow. As i am actively pointing Google at these pages, and it is my main navigation, should the page they go to be noindexed? As its the canonical i want to rank. Hopefully this makes sense. Cheers
Technical SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
Robots File
For some reason the robots file on this site: http://rushhour.net.au/robots.txt Is giving this in Google: <cite class="_Rm">www.rushhour.net.au/bootcamp.html</cite>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txtLearn moreCan anyone tell me why please?thanks.
Technical SEO | | SuitsAdmin0 -
Product meta tags are not updating in my Magneto website!
I need some help! For some reason, each time I update the product meta tags in my Magento website, it doesn't change on the current website? Could someone help me understand why that is?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
I use All in one SEO pack for wordpress and i i have 2 meta tags i need to delete them is this the meta description tag ?
add_option("aiosp_post_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_page_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_home_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Home Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_do_log", null, 'All in One SEO Plugin write log file', 'yes'); */
Technical SEO | | fhnhockey0880 -
Can I Disallow Faceted Nav URLs - Robots.txt
I have been disallowing /*? So I know that works without affecting crawling. I am wondering if I can disallow the faceted nav urls. So disallow: /category.html/? /category2.html/? /category3.html/*? To prevent the price faceted url from being cached: /category.html?price=1%2C1000
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser
and
/category.html?price=1%2C1000&product_material=88 Thanks!0 -
Mobile site: robots.txt best practices
If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Duplicate Meta Description in GWMT
We've just discovered that there are multiple duplicate URLs indexed for a site that we're working on. It seems that when new versions of the site was developed in the last couple of years, there were new page names and URL structures that were used. All of these seem to be showing up as Duplicate Meta Descriptions in Google's WMT, which is not surprising as they are basically the same page with the same content that are just sitting on different page names/URLs. This is an example of the situation, where URL 5 is the current version. Note: all the others are still live and resolve, although they are not linked to from the current site. URL 1: www.example.com/blue-tshirts.html (Version 1 - January 2010) URL 2: www.example.com/blue-t-shirts.html (Version 2 - July 2010) URL 3: www.example.com/blue_t_shirts.html (Version 3 - November 2010) URL 4: www.example.com/buy/blue_tshirts.html (Version 4 - January 2011) URL 5: www.example.com/buy/bluetshirts.html (Version 5 - April 2011) Presumably, this is a clear case of duplicate content. QUESTION: In order to solve it, shall we 301 all of the previous URLs to the current one - ie. Redirect URLs 1-4 to URL 5? Or, should some of them be NoIndexed? To complicate matters, there is Pagination on most of them. For example: URL 1: www.example.com/blue-tshirts.html (Version 1 - January 2010) URL 1a: www.example.com/page-1/blue-tshirts.html URL 1b: www.example.com/page-2/blue-tshirts.html URL 1c: www.example.com/page-3/blue-tshirts.html URL 4: www.example.com/buy/blue_tshirts.html URL 4a: www.example.com/buy/page-1/blue_tshirts.html URL 4b: www.example.com/buy/page-2/blue_tshirts.html URL 4c: www.example.com/buy/page-3/blue_tshirts.html URL 5: www.example.com/buy/bluetshirts.html URL 5a: www.example.com/buy/page-1/bluetshirts.html URL 5b: www.example.com/buy/page-2/bluetshirts.html URL 5c: www.example.com/buy/page-3/bluetshirts.html Since URL 5 is the current site, we are going to 'NoIndex, Follow' URLs 5a, 5b and 5c, which is what we understand to be the correct thing to do for paginated pages. QUESTION: What shall we do with URLs 1a, 1b and 1c? Should we apply the same "No Index, Follow" OR should they be 301'd to their respective counterparts in 5a, 5b and 5c? QUESTION: In the same way, since URL 4 is the version just before the current live Version 5, does it make a different on whether the paginated pages (ie 4a, 4b and 4c) should be No Indexed or 301'd? Thanks in advance for all responses and suggestions, it's greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | orangechew0 -
Subdomain Robots.txt
If I have a subdomain (a blog) that is having tags and categories indexed when they should not be, because they are creating duplicate content. Can I block them using a robots.txt file? Can I/do I need to have a separate robots file for my subdomain? If so, how would I format it? Do I need to specify that it is a subdomain robots file, or will the search engines automatically pick this up? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JohnECF0