Website Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tweaks: The “Noindex” Meta Tag

Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 22 of January , 2008 at 3:10 am

One can argue the virtues of robot commands in meta tags until they are blue in the face and still not be able to convince people that they remain useful in website search engine optimization today. It is a fact that the efficacy of these meta tags has diminished somewhat, web spiders index pages automatically now, but there are times that a well placed meta tag can be extremely useful; especially when you want to tell a robot not to do something.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Before I give you my analysis of this meta tag, I will give you the SiteProNews take on it:

The noindex command, the opposite of the index command, tells search engine spiders not to index the content of a page. It’s important to note however that search engine spiders will still follow the links on a page that uses only this command.

When not used for legitimate purposes, this tag can be dangerous because it can put you at risk for penalization by most, if not all search engines. This is because you can use a noindex tag to hide pages with multiple links that you don’t want visitors to see but that you do want all search engines to index.

There are however some legitimate uses for the noindex command. For example, if you have a dynamic site and you’ve created static pages to replace some of your dynamic pages, which can make them easier for search engine spiders to access, you could put a noindex tag on the dynamic version.

There are legitimate reasons why you might not like a particular web page indexed. If it contains personal information that you do not want to share with the entire web, you can shield it from indexing with the “noindex” tag. Part of website search engine optimization is keeping people on the right parts of your site and off the wrong parts. Not everything needs to be or should be searchable. It is often better to use this in combination with other robot commands in order to avoid penalization.

FREE Website Design & Website Development Price Quotes – Compare and Save!

Category: Website Search Engine Optimization

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg