SEO Strategy For Noindex And Nofollow

Very often, you’ll see nofollow together with noindex. Although they are very common in search engine optimization planning but still very confusing if you’re not paying attention to them. From the words, noindex simply means do not index the page while nofollow means do not follow the link.

What Is Nofollow Link Attribute?

When a search bot comes across nofollow link, it will know that it should not crawl the site on the other end. Additionally, it will prevent the passing of PageRank through a particular link to the site. Here is the definition from Google’s search engine optimization starter guide:

Setting the value of the “rel” attribute of a link to “nofollow” will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn’t be followed or pass your page’s reputation to the pages linked to. Nofollowing a link is adding rel=”nofollow” inside of the link’s anchor tag.

Here is the correct link attribute for nofollow.

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.yourlink.com">Link Text</a>

Remember, the nofollow link attribute is at the link level which means it only has effect on the particular link that has the tag.

What Is Nofollow Meta Robots Tag?

Nofollow link attribute has a big brother, which is nofollow in meta robots tag. It has same effect as nofollow link attribute but at the higher level which is page level. What it mean is search engines should not crawl all the links on the page which has nofollow meta robots tag. That’s why I call it big brother because it applies to all the links on the page while little brother only affects 1 particular link.

It has the following syntax.

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

What Is Noindex Meta Robots Tag?

In order for your page not to show on the results page of search engines, you would need to use a meta robots tag with the noindex attribute, which looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

This meta tag is applied to the page level which means search engines should not index the whole page.

How To Effectively Use Noindex And Nofollow?

For some reason, most people use a noindex and nofollow tag as the default noindex tag when just using the noindex tag alone would be more appropriate in the meta robots. One of the reason you may want to do this is keeping the site private from search engine but allow public visitor who get invited. And you want to keep all the internal pages and links private.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

When you add the nofollow tag to a meta robots tag on a page, it causes all links on that page to be tagged as nofollow. Sometimes you want to tag all links on a page as nofollow. Typically this is the case when the page links to only pages that are causing you SEO issues such as duplicate content  or you are trying to stop the page from passing any page rank for some strategic reason.

Most of the time when you want to noindex a page, you still want it to pass page rank. For example if you have a page number 2 of a list you may want to noindex it to avoid a duplication issue with page number 1, but you still may want it to pass page rank through the links in the list.

Usually there are 3 situations you need to use nofollow attribute link.

1. When you’re not sure about the quality of the content of the link, perhaps it’s spam site
2. When someone paid for the link (i.e. a company buying advertising on your blog or website)
3. When the page at the end of the link is not crawlable (i.e. login page link)

By default, WordPress is putting a nofollow attribute on the comment section links because we can’t verify the quality of the sites when somebody post a comment. Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you’re not giving your page’s hard-earned reputation to a spammy site. If you’re willing to vouch for links added by third parties such as trusted commenter (you can manually check those comments and approve them manually if you want to), then there’s no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site.

Generally there is no need to use nofollow link in the post content of your blog as the link is trusted and verified by you. Sometime when you’re writing content and wish to reference a website, but don’t want to pass on your reputation to it. For example, imagine that you’re writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to make a reference to a spam site. You want to warn others of the site, so you include the link to it in your content; however, you certainly don’t want to give the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a good time to use nofollow.

Conclusion

Think about the noindex and nofollow search engine optimization strategy for your website or blog. Share with us about your experience in the comment box below.

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Tagged as: Nofollow, Noindex, Search Engine Optimization, SEO