Some of the pages on your website have a purpose other than ranking in search engines or generating traffic to your website. These pages need to be there, as adhesive for other pages or because you need them to be obtainable on your website. How do you make sure these pages don’t end up on the SERPs?
What does noindex nofollow mean?
Noindex means that search engines shouldn’t index a web page and should not show up on the search engine’s result pages. Nofollow means that search engine spiders should not follow the links on that page. The robots meta tag is a code in the head section of a web page and it lets search engines know how to crawl and whether or not to index a page. You can add that to each page to figure out whether or not it needs to be crawled and indexed.
Certain post types
From time to time, a plugin or developer adds a custom post type that you don’t want to be indexed. Relatedly, eCommerce solutions added specifications like dimensions and weight as a custom post type as well. These pages are deemed to be low-quality content. You’ll note that these pages have no use for a visitor or Google, so they need to be kept out of the result pages too.
The thank you page
Thank you pages serve no other intent other than to thank the customer for whatever they fill out. These pages are just typically thin content that’s worthless for anyone using Google to find valuable information. Hence, those pages should not show up on the search results pages.
Admin and login pages
The majority of login pages should not be on Google. Keep yours off of search results by adding a noindex. The exceptions are login pages that help a community. Would you Google one of these if you were not working in your company? If not, it’s seemingly easy to conclude that Google doesn’t have a need to index login pages. Fortunately, if you are operating WordPress, you’re in the clear because it automatically noindexes your site’s login page.
Conclusion
Whether or not to noindex a page or nofollow a link gets down to two questions: do you want this page to show up in the search results pages, and should search engines follow links on this page? For ‘thank you’ pages or login pages, for instance, the answer to the first questions is no. For a page with lots of affiliate links, the answer to the second question is also no. Keep in mind some of the examples from this post, and you shouldn’t have any more difficulty choosing the answers for your own site!
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