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

Writing by Brick Marketing on Wednesday, 23 of January , 2008 at 9:04 am

When it comes to website search engine optimization, protecting parts of your site from search engine spiders can be just as important as making sure that your pages are properly indexed. Why would anyone not want traffic to parts of their site? There are plenty of good reasons. The “noindex.nofollow” meta tag is particulary useful if you want to keep part of your site off the grid. As it also contains the “nofollow” tag, the spiders on the page will not follow any links from that page. If you have a site that is well laid out, this is not really an issue as long as the search engine spider can access all of your other pages from other pages, your hidden content will not have a negative impact on your level of website search engine optimization.

• To protect information that you would prefer to be private or semi-private.
• To keep test pages from being indexed.
• To allow legitimate duplicate content to exist without being penalized.

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

The following passage is taken from an article on SiteProNews, I think they give a very good explanation of this powerful set of tags and the full article is worth a read if you have time:

Obviously, noindex and nofollow are powerful tags – and in combination, they can make a page and the subsequent pages to which it links invisible to nearly all search engines. This combination command tells search engine spiders, “Do not read this page; do not follow any of the links on this page; do not include this page in your index.”
This command has its beneficial uses. For example, it can be placed on pages on a site that have duplicate content for legitimate reasons. A website might have both a page for the United States and a page for England that cover the same product with exactly the same content. However, nearly all search engines would see this as duplicate content and could devalue both pages. So placing this command on one of them means that search engine spiders will walk on by and you won’t be penalized.

Remember, search engine spiders can help or hurt you. Website search engine optimization is all about getting those spiders to do what you want and not do what you don’t want them to. All it takes is a few simple little tags for some great website search engine optimization fine tuning. Turning off the robots can be just as important as any other aspect of website search engine optimization, especially if you have a large website.

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Category: Website Search Engine Optimization

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