Being followed by Robots?

lula

Senior Member
Does telling robots to 'not follow' pages (other than the index page) affect search engine ranking? I'm suddenly worried... :confused:
PS Sorry if this short question requires a lengthy answer...
 
Well I was advised to use <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOFOLLOW" /> on the index page, and <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"> on all the others, supposedly so that ONLY the index page came up in Google etc's searches and looked nice and tidy (as opposed to it listing the site's other pages as well). I'm just wondering if I've been misinformed? Is there a better way to achieve this??
 
Googlebot interprets the following robots meta tag values:

  • NOINDEX - prevents the page from being included in the index.
  • NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents Googlebot from following an individual link.)
  • NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
  • NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
  • NOODP - blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
  • NONE - equivalent to "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW".
So you're telling Robots to not follow any links from the homepage, and to not index inner pages and not follow links on inner pages.

nice and tidy (as opposed to it listing the site's other pages as well
Sounds very strange to me! Why would you not want the content pages indexed too? You'd be missing out on the potential for long-tail traffic to the site by preventing indexing of the inner pages.

Can you share the website URL out of interest?
Oh, and in answer, I wouldn't recommend blocking all inner pages from being indexed, really can't see any advantage to doing so. Greg
 
The site I used it on is this one: The Charles Causley Trust

I did it a couple of years ago and it was only my second ever website (the first being my own), so please forgive any elements of stupidity!

As my background is in print, and I'm self (and Lynda.com) taught in Dreamweaver I keep coming up against issues because there are BIG holes in my knowledge.

I was trying to do the no follow thing because I'd noticed that lots of other sites only seemed to have their home page listed when you Googled them (like designforums appears once) whereas my site had all the pages listed and I thought (maybe wrongly!) that it looked a bit amateur...
 
lula said:
I was trying to do the no follow thing because I'd noticed that lots of other sites only seemed to have their home page listed when you Googled them (like designforums appears once) whereas my site had all the pages listed and I thought (maybe wrongly!) that it looked a bit amateur...

It all depends on the keyword you're searching, eg 'design forums' will just show designforums.co.uk once because of the competition, ie. lots of other sites have 'Design Forums' in their titles and META description, as well as links pointing to them.

But for a very specific search then if one site looks to have a lot of relevant content/pages on that term then, and competition is low, chances are Google will display a few of them, if not all. I wouldn't say it looks ameteur, and aslong as the titles for pages are unique, along with relevant descriptions, it will look the opposite, professional, as the site will appear to be highly relevant and an authority on the topic :)
 
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