I would lie if I say that SEO should be every blogger’s priority if ever wants to succeed on blogging.
Anyway, it’s one of those little factors that put together build your way to the ultimate living way: blogging.
That’s why today I feel like posting about SEO, more precisely, about no index tags.
As my post explaining the no follow tags had a positive impact, I thought it would be nice to comment the benefits of no index tags, because some bloggers are still wondering and have some doubts about some points that should be cleared, so let’s keep it simple and straight to the point.
Although there are no big secrets around them, it’s still worth a look.
Index / No index tags
This is the typical no index tag structure:
< html >
< head >
< meta name = “robots” content=”noindex” / >
< p > Content here < /p >
< /head >
< /html >
As you see, you call search engines robots to tell them not to index a particular page.
Once a spider start reading that page, it will automatically see the no index tag, so it will stop crawling it, avoiding it to be visible on SE.
It’s that simple.
Unless you modify it on your robots.txt file, your pages will be indexed by default.
Which are the effects of using no index tags?
The effects are clear: It’s used to avoid pages to appear on SE rankings.
Why would I want to exclude a page from Google?
You must be thinking “Hey! I want the maximum traffic possible! I’m not excluding any page at all!”
The real use of no index tags, from my point of view, comes when you want to avoid duplicate content and to avoid a bunch of “useless” pages to rank on search rankings, as it can hurt your rankings. As an example, you could include no index tags on your archives pages (weekly archives, monthly archives…)
Differences between disallowing on Robots.txt and using no index tag?
We will see more detailed info about this on further posts, but disallowing robots to crawl your site using robots.txt file won’t guarantee you that your site won’t show at rankings, but no index tags will.
Differences between nofollow and no index?
If you still have doubts about it you better check the post about dofollow and nofollow tags. Remember that no follow just prevents to pass reputation to the site you’re linking. It will still be crawled and ranked though.
What if I want to delete an indexed url?
Easy, just use the Google Removal Tool to request an url to be removed from the index.
This post completes the robots tags (Do Follow , no follow and no index).
I love SEO, so stay tuned for more SEO tips.
Thanks for reading.
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{ 5 trackbacks }
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I wasn’t even aware you could do this. Thanks to sharing that. When I have a spare bit of time I’ll see if it will work on removing my archive page from search engines.
[Reply]
Sam Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Archives, categories…
Glad it helped
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I’ve updated the post with a removal tool that you guys could use if you ever want to remove an url from google rankings.
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An important tip for SEO is keep keywords simple and target just one or two keywords per page, with the most important one on the homepage.
[Reply]
Sam Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
That’s right.
Thanks for adding those tips. We could add that it would be better to go for keywords with few competition instead of thinking about the big competition ones.
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Noindex is also useful if you have a website that has multiple languages and uses php to control what content is displayed. Say your default lang is English, that means you could have 2 duplicates of index.html, those being index.html and index.html?lang=en. for one or the other, you could use noindex to avoid a dup content penalty.
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Very great site.
The message here is genuinely helpful.
I will tell my friends.
Cheers
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Good Morning!!! Make money blogging is one of the most outstanding innovative websites of its kind. I take advantage of reading it every day. All the best.
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Good article! I have a blog site that and the archive pages and blog label pages appeared in Googles index as well as the actual blog post. This created duplicate content issues with Google, so using the “no index” in conjuction with a robots.txt file and 301 redirects allowed me to resolve the issue.
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Just to get my head around this, if I could not implement changes to control duplicate content at server access level either thru Apache or IIS, (talking specifically here about .com / .com/index.html duplication issues) but changed all site urls on the site pointing to index.html to .com and implemented on the index page:
(this should be seen as a 301 redirect by the SE’s)
in addition to using No Index….
…will the root level (.com) still be indexed ok without any negative effects? Sorry if this seems a daft question!
[Reply]
Sorry the code was taken out on submit – post should read:
Just to get my head around this, if I could not implement changes to control duplicate content at server access level either thru Apache or IIS, (talking specifically here about .com / .com/index.html duplication issues) but changed all site urls on the site pointing to index.html to .com and implemented on the index page:
meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=0;url=http://www.mysite.com” /
(this should be seen as a 301 redirect by the SE’s)
in addition to using No Index….
…will the root level (.com) still be indexed ok without any negative effects? Sorry if this seems a daft question!
[Reply]