Noindex and nofollow

noindex

If you identify pages which should not be index you need to use noindex

noindex is a directive that can be used to instruct search engines not to index a specific web page or a group of web pages on a website. When a web page is indexed by a search engine, it is added to the search engine’s database and can be displayed in search engine results pages (SERPs) when a relevant search query is entered by a user.
However, there may be certain web pages that website owners do not want to appear in search results for various reasons, such as duplicate content, private or confidential information, or low-quality pages.By using the noindex directive, website owners can prevent search engines from indexing specific web pages or sections of their website. This is achieved by adding a specific tag in the HTML code of the page, instructing search engines not to crawl or index that particular page. The noindex directive is commonly used in conjunction with other directives, such as nofollow or disallow, to prevent search engines from following links or crawling specific sections of a website.It is important to note that using the noindex directive does not necessarily mean that a web page is completely hidden from the public. Users can still access the page directly by typing the URL into their browser, but it will not appear in search engine results. Additionally, using the noindex directive should be done with caution, as it can have a significant impact on a website’s SEO performance and should only be used when necessary.

Example

<!DOCTYPE h
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
(…)
</h
<body>(…)</b
</html>

nofollow

Description

Introduced by Google in 2005, nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the ‘rel’ attribute of an HTML element ‘a’ to instruct search engines that the hyperlink should not affect the ranking of the link target of the search engine’s index. The usage of nofollow has an impact on link juice as none is passed on. It can also be used for an entire document.

Example

<a href="https://www.example.com/">Example</a>

≠

<a href="https://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example</a>

                            ##for entire document

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

Why was it created and what is its usage

Google wanted to differentiate content links from other less valuable links such as in the comments, as a guest, or automated. It should be used for Purchased links/Affiliate links and paid advertising, Press releases, and Guest posts. Also it should be for any link that is not trustworthy. .

Nofollow and SEO

There has been so far no evidence that a too high proportion of nofollow links in a site’s backlink profile is a disadvantage although a benchmark can be established with successful competitors. A lot of important sites such as Wikipedia use exclusively nofollow links even for high profile and verified pages.

The alternatives (since 2019)

    rel="sponsored"  ##for sponsored links
    rel="ugc"  ### for user generated content: comments and posts

How Search Engines treat nofollow

Google and Bing say they do not in general follow such links. Other such as Yahoo actually still follow such links but excludes it from the ranking calculations.