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When it comes to optimizing your website for higher search engine rankings, there are different tools that you have at your disposal. And if you look into the backend even just a little, you would discover the power of metadata tags, which are pieces of data that provide information on webpages. Two of the most important meta tags you would encounter in your SEO toolbox are noindex and nofollow tags.
These tags are used to signal to search engines how they should crawl and index your website, and using them correctly can have a significant impact on your search engine rankings. However, unlike other tags, which have significant differences between them, the functions of noindex and nofollow tags are so similar that many people confuse them.
If you understand the function of each, though, it would be easy to pick the difference. In this article, we will dive deep into the topic of noindex and nofollow tags, and explain how you can use them to optimize your website for search engines.
When you use software such as the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool to analyze your website, you’ll notice that part of its comprehensive checks is the presence of noindex and nofollow tags. The screenshot below is the result of a test showing that the webpage does not use a noindex tag, indicating that it can be crawled by search engines.
These, and other metrics are available technical data from the content analysis page of the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool. You can combine these with information from competitor research, backlink monitoring, pagespeed measurements, and so on to get a full picture of where your website stands.
However, while Eye10 allows you to conduct a comprehensive analysis, the focus here is on noindex and nofollow tags, since many people often confuse them for each other.
In simple words, noindex tags contain data-encoded instructions that tell search engines not to index a specific page. This means that the page would not appear in search results since the search engine bot would ignore it. If the aim of SEO is to gain maximum traffic via search engine results, then why would anyone allow certain pages to not be indexed, you might ask.
Well, this tag is often used on pages that are not important to a website’s overall SEO strategy, such as duplicate pages, login pages, and thank-you pages. It is evident that while such pages are integral to a site’s structure, they do not need to appear in SERPs. To implement noindex tags, you’ll need to add a meta tag to the `<head>` section of your HTML document. The tag should look like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
The slightly different code works specifically for the Google crawl bot:
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”>
On the other hand, nofollow tags are used to tell search engines not to follow the links on a specific page. Such links would still be crawled and indexed. However, they would not count any link juice or ranking value for the webpage.
This tag is often used on pages that have a lot of potentially low-quality or spammy content, such as forum pages or user-generated content pages. They are also used for sponsored links. Google frowns against trying to manipulate its algorithm by paying for backlinks. Therefore, marking a link as sponsored or nofollow helps you to avoid Google’s penalties.
To add a nofollow tag to a link – and you can achieve this even as a beginner – you’ll need to add the “rel” attribute with the value “nofollow” to the link’s HTML:
<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>example</a>
It is important to mention that Google favors more specific attributes for user-generated content (rel=”ugc”) and sponsored content (rel=”sponsored”) respectively. Unlike nofollow tags, Google does not entirely ignore content with those tags. Rather, it uses them “along with other signals—as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links”.
It’s important to remember that noindex tags only prevent search engines from indexing the page, not from crawling it, while nofollow tags only prevent the link from being followed and counted as a vote of trust, but still can be followed by the search engine crawlers. By understanding the difference between these tags and how they should be used, you can improve your website’s search engine rankings and provide a better user experience for your visitors.
If you are not sure whether you are correctly using nofollow and noindex tags on your web pages, use the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool to conduct a comprehensive analysis of both technical SEO and keyword optimization data. Sign up to start enjoying these benefits now.
– Title tags: These tags provide the title of the webpage and are displayed as the clickable headline for a webpage in search engine results.
– Description tags: These tags provide a brief summary of the web page's content and are displayed below the title in search engine results.
– Canonical tags: These tags are used to specify the preferred version of a webpage when there are multiple versions available.
– Open Graph tags: These tags provide information about a webpage, such as its title, description, and images, that are used when the webpage is shared on social media platforms.
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