Everything you need to know about NoIndex, NoFollow and more!
What is the NoIndex, NoFollow Tag?
While using a robot.txt file to prevent a directory or a website from being crawled can be work, it can also be a bit complicated. If that is the case you can use a noindex nofollow tag in its replacement.
If you have a web page such as a special promotion page, a thank you page, or a page that is under construction, that you do not want to appear in the search results, then the noindex nofollow tag serves as a quick an easy way to accomplish this.
What Does The NoIndex NoFollow Code Look Like?
The noindex nofollow meta tags looks like <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> and appears in the <head>. This short piece of code contains three valuable pieces of information:
Robots: The robots section is a tag calling all bots. If you want to block a specific bot like Googlebot, you can replace Robots with Googlebot.
Noindex: This part of the code is specifically telling the crawlers and bots to ignore this web page and not include it within their index. An alternative would be use the index. Index is the opposite which tells the crawlers and bots to index the page.
Nofollow: Means the buck stops here! Literally it states to not follow any links on to their appropriate page. Similar an alternative would be follow which is telling the crawlers and bots to pass link equity over to the next page.
When Should I Use a Noindex, Nofollow tag?
As mentioned prior there are lots of uses for a noindex,nofollow tag. Common uses include author pages, pagination pages, 404 pages, search results pages, thank you pages, admin pages, media pages, and more