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Today we’re going to talk about a mistake that people make all too often – blocking pages with robots.txt when they have links to other pages on your site or elsewhere and thereby killing any link juice the blocked page may have. Of course, there is even some debate in the SEO circles about whether or not we should be blocking anything at all (after all, why put it up in the first place if you are going to block it?), but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.
Many people fail to understand exactly how the search engines process blocking requests, and the various methods to do so. There are two methods, used in the most of seo services, that can be employed to block the search engines from accessing and crawling particular pages:
- Blocking with robots.txt – Tells the search engine not to visit the URL, but to go ahead and keep it in its index of pages. So the search engine knows it exists, but has no idea what is on the page.
- Blocking with the meta tag NoIndex – Tells the search engine to go ahead and visit, but not to remember anything it sees there.
When you use robots.txt to block access to a page, the links will appear in most of the search engines as just that – a link. It will have no title, description or anything else.
The problem is that your blocked pages – chances are they have accumulated links and “juice” from the search engines, but they cannot pass it on. So if you have content downstream being linked from these blocked pages that isn’t blocked then guess what – you lose all your link juice. You are in effect hurting yourself!
If you insist of hiding pages behind robots.txt regarding your search engine optimization strategies, then there are two important things to remember:
- If you are going to link from anything off the page, use the nofollow directive to help conserve link juice.
- If you know you have a page that is being blocked by robots.txt that has link juice, either consider removing it from being “hidden” or use the meta tag “noindex, follow” so they can pass their link juice on to other pages on your site that could benefit from it.
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Traditionally, the use of nofollow was a good way to help control your page rankings by making sure that only the content you wanted to count was actually counted for your site. However, as with any tool there are dangers of using nofollow too much. Today I want to talk a little bit about when using nofollow isn’t such a good idea – and how it might actually hurt your site.
Nofollow is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and should always be used with guidelines and standards for your site. If you let people go crazy using it you can cause a lot of rank harm to your site that can take a long time to undo.
The short and sweet of nofollow is that when you link to content with nofollow in the anchor tag you are telling the search engines to not give the content “points” (as it were) for being linked too, and to not index the content. Now, for internal links on sites this can be very important – after all, you probably don’t need (or want) your terms of service, legal notices, etc. indexed – they do no good and can actually distract from your main site depending on the query people are performing.
Where people often fall down with nofollow is that they begin to use it for pages that they think is of little importance, but may actually be providing a lot of traffic for pages downstream. Many people think they should nofollow their About Us or Contact Us page, but when searching for information about a company or product these two pages can provide a wealth of information for the search engines.
So where should you not be using nofollow? Generally speaking, I recommend don´t use nofollow for:
- Product pages
- Contact Us
- About Us
- Paginated Content (Page 1 of 3, etc.)
- Category or Topic Structures
Places where it is OK to use nofollow with little risk include:
- Privacy Policy
- Legal Policy
- Any dynamic page based on user login (like a shopping cart)
- Any product or service page that may be adult-only in nature
Through proper use of nofollow you can make sure that the content that matters the most on your site is the content that gets ranked and indexed high. By employing standards of what you use nofollow for upfront you can help prevent costly ranking mistakes from improper use.
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The other day I was looking at some tracking data for the movers and shakers in the blogosphere over at Blogscope when I came across a rapidly rising subdomain I’d never heard of – blog.indecisionforever.com. Curious as to what this was, and why so many people would be linking to it in their blogs, I started to dig deeper into the data. What I ended up finding was a lesson in link campaigns and how even the big companies can be guilty of link baiting.
First, I found out that the links were all coming from people who had seen a recent episode of the Daily Show with John Stewart where he was interviewing Jim Cramer. They all seem to be coming from people who posted in their blogs and such video clips of the interview itself. Yet the funny part was when I actually went to the blogs these links were supposedly coming from I couldn’t find them! I looked at several of the top blogs (quality blogs too, no link spam or junk blogs) that supposedly had this link and it was the same thing – zilch, nada, nothing!
Determined to find out what was going on I went back to one of the top ranked pages and started going over every line, every ad and every picture until I found it – right below the linked video in dark grey text on a light grey background!
It turned out it was some old-fashioned link campaigning going on, but with a twist. It wasn’t the blog owners doing it – it was the hosted video from Comedy Central! Sneaky move on their part (that actually worked!) to get rankings and views on the search term of “Jim Cramer” through anchor text and links.
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It can be frustrating to check out your competition’s website, or a website that has a complementary product or service to yours, and find they are ranking high while you are barely showing up on the search engine radar. It’s even more frustrating when you apply SEO techniques to your website and still are being outranked by other sites that hit on some of the same keywords that you aim for. So why are they ranking high and you are still struggling? The answer may be because of your links. Not all links to your site are created equal, and if you don’t have enough high quality links your site can really take a hit in the search engine rankings no matter how good your other SEO techniques are.
Continue Reading: When Links Go Bad – Determining Quality LinksRelated Posts:
Unless you’ve been living in a vacuum, no doubt you are keenly aware of the roaring popularity of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and Tumblr. The popularity of these sites, combined with the ease of updating them, has transformed the blogosphere. Today, more people update their micro-blogging sites more than they do traditional blogs. Millions of people are linking to their status updates left on these sites and the search engines are happily crawling along looking at the links. The question for SEO firms is this: How does this change affect SEO techniques, and is it time to abandon the nofollow directive?
Continue Reading: SEO Changes: Is it Time to Abandon the NoFollow Directive?Related Posts:
It’s always amazing how often businesses don’t want to link out from their own blogs or web pages. They do everything they can to lock users into their own virtual world; and I’m sure that a few of them would disable the “close” button on the web browser if they could! So why all the fuss and resistance to outbound linking? Most of the time it comes from outdated ways of thinking and fears that external links are going to have potential customers clicking en mass to leave your site for greener pastures. So let’s take a look at these fears one by one and help dispel the myths and present the facts.
Continue Reading: SEO Strategies for Outbound Links: Do not Be Afraid to Link OutRelated Posts:
It can be extremely difficult to test the effectiveness of your SEO changes on many elements of your site. Controlled environments are rare, and even then you don’t know what the search engines are going to change come tomorrow that is going to affect your SEO strategies today. However, despite all the challenges there is one area where you can do some “live testing” without worry – on your anchor text for internal links.
Continue Reading: Testing the SEO Value of Anchor Text on Internal LinksRelated Posts:
Think of a popular site that you maintain or run. Now think of all the inbound links that the site receives. Perhaps some of those you helped nurture, but how many of those are using poor SEO practices that aren’t living up to their full potential to boost the site higher in the rankings? By taking a few minutes to reach out to those who are linking to your sites you can have a measurable impact on your search rankings by making sure people focus on quality links and not just random links.
Continue Reading: Inbound Links – Ask For And Enjoy Its SEO PotentialRelated Posts:
Seasons change, the kids are grown up and off to college, and websites that once offered a product or service disappear into web history or stop offering the feature. All these things are just facts of life – but luckily for those of us engaged in SEO the third one is something we can use to our advantage. By finding sites that are still ranked, but no longer offering relevant content, we can turn what were basically dead sites and ghost links into creative link strategies to help our clients.
Continue Reading: Using the Ghosts of Links Past To Build Your SEO Link StrategyRelated Posts:
Have you ever heard people use the phrase “new school” and “old school”? They are talking about ways of doing things, or certain styles and fashions. Something is considered “new school” if it’s a radical departure from how we dressed, thought, acted or behaved in the past. “Old school” refers to ideas, beliefs, designs and such that have been around for what seems like forever. When you think about link building for your SEO business, are you old or new school?
Continue Reading: Link Building – The New School