Here’s a great little tip from RAND that I’m sure to use in many projects to come.
Instead of using rel="nofollow" or worse robots.txt to remove entries from Google, use the meta tag:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
…instead as it still stops the page from being shown in Google (which by all accounts robots.txt doesn’t guarantee) but lets the page pass juice so there’s no dead juice flow within your site.
Great stuff, guys, its advanced tips like this that keep me interested in SEO.
Great Tip Mark, I did not know that using Meta tags we can block the robots crawling the content and still can pass on the link juice within the site.
This is awesome.
Should be good to use on pages like terms and conditions, privacy policy and stuff like that in addition to hiding form processors etc.
What do you guys think about using NOINDEX,FOLLOW on search pages? I use a search script that uses GET method in the search form. It makes it possible to eliminate repetitive searches when people hit the back button – the URL of the search result is exactly the same and their browser serves the page from local cache instead of loading my server with another search (search is VERY CPU intensive here).
Anyways, I’ve been eliminating the search results from indexing using robots.txt in fear of repercussions from Google for duplicate/automatically generated content. But, if it’s no-indexed, it cannot rank for anything and should not be a problem in terms of duplication. Yet, if Googlebot picks up a link or two while visiting the search page, it may actually help getting the individual pages indexed.
Any thoughts on that? Anybody done it (and didn’t get slapped for that)?
Cheers!
S.
Its a good thing you’re thinking about this as Google really doesn’t like search pages in its index which could cause you lots of problems in the long run. However I personally like your idea of using these pages as a springboard to boost your sites relevancy to key subjects. I havent tested such a thing but why not add it, wait a few weeks and let us know :).