noindex,nofollow

Epicea_old · Tue Nov 13, 2012 5:36 pm

Can the booking pages be made noindex,nofollow please? It serves no real purpose and it makes the log files fairly useless.

Wed Nov 14, 2012 9:55 am

We do try and filter robots out of the booking logs. If you find a robot is getting past our filter please let me know and I will add it to the filter.

Epicea_old · Wed Nov 14, 2012 3:34 pm

That doesn't sound very good. Exactly how are you filtering them out?

(edit) sorry, re-reading your post, are you saying they're filtered from the results are filtered from accessing the page?

Either way it's not ideal. We've now got the booking page in a secure iframe which search engines are seeing as a sea of links to beds24. One of issues with that is pollution of the log file but it's not great SEO from our point of view. The best solution might be for all the links to be noindex,nofollow with the second best to make the whole page/iframe noindex,nofollow

Thu Nov 15, 2012 3:44 pm

Epicea wrote: are you saying they're filtered from the results are filtered from accessing the page?

Robots are filtered out of the results presented on the log report page, we do not block robots from accessing the page.

Epicea_old · Sun Nov 18, 2012 1:08 pm

OK. Nevertheless, it would be much better if those links were noindex,nofollow. A sea of external links to the beds24 site is not good for SEO.

Making the whole booking page noindex,nofollow makes the most sense, it's no benefit for any beds24 user having it crawled. If anyone kicks up a stink then can we just have a different version of the booking page which is noindex,nofollow?

amberbb · Sun Nov 18, 2012 8:30 pm

Epicea wrote:Making the whole booking page noindex,nofollow makes the most sense, it's no benefit for any beds24 user having it crawled. If anyone kicks up a stink then can we just have a different version of the booking page which is noindex,nofollow?

I agree, Epicea.

However I'm both surprised and disappointed that (after asking you in this forum twice and using the email facility here) you still have not bothered to either list (which would be good for your SEO) or tell me your own website's URL so we can see what you're writing about in future!

Epicea_old · Tue Nov 27, 2012 1:55 pm

If we can get back to the original request please.

We have the booking page embedded in a secure iframe. Our SEO suffers because search engines see that page a sea of links. The best solution might be for all the links to be noindex,nofollow with the second best to make the whole page/iframe noindex,nofollow.

Is that something that can be actioned please?

Wed Nov 28, 2012 1:21 pm

If you are concerned why not just put a NOFOLLOW in the iframe.

I am not really sure that links to your online booking service would hurt your search results, it is also possible that providing an online booking service may help raise your page rank.

Epicea_old · Thu Nov 29, 2012 11:23 am

markkinchin wrote:If you are concerned why not just put a NOFOLLOW in the iframe.

That won't work, it's not valid markup for an iframe.

markkinchin wrote:I am not really sure that links to your online booking service would hurt your search results, it is also possible that providing an online booking service may help raise your page rank.

I'm not sure that's the point really. We do have a booking page, it's content can, and I hope does, improve our page rank. Links to our booking page are not the problem.

The problem is that the booking page itself contains many links to the next part of the booking form and each day displayed is a link. That's about 40 or 50 links minimum although it's context dependent.

If we could make the iframe nofollow then the whole content of the booking page would not be visible, that would be a bad thing. But you can't do that because there isn't a nofollow option for an iframe anyway.

If the beds24 page, in our iframe, were nofollow (<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="nofollow">) then the page and all the content would be indexed. But, none of the links on the page would be followed.

SEO is such voodoo that you absolutely cannot state with any confidence the 40 or 50 links aren't detrimental. You can know with 100% certainty that having the links followed doesn't do any good. The links lead to pages that are part of the booking process and will not add to our search engine rankings. In fact they're a nuisance, most of those 50-odd links won't exist the next time the search engine visits the page. The booking page will generate about (num_of_rooms * 30) new links per month. Link memory for the search engine means they can try and index over half of them. Most of those attempts will result in error messages about time-travel and the rest will block on a form needing input. I don't want any of those pages appearing in search index for the property. I particularly do not want a search to believe that the booking page and it's children have special value as volatile and regularly updated content.

This only impacts people using the booking page in an iframe and I assume most people don't do that without having a secure site.

I know search engines do traverse those links because I see it in the log. Filtering the log entries out isn't a solution to this problem, adding "<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="nofollow">" to the page actually stops the robots without stopping them indexing the page.

If there's some value indexing the pages below the booking form then I can't see it but I'm more than happy to be told what that is.

Thu Nov 29, 2012 5:10 pm

Okay you make some very good points.

One of the links that can appear on the page is a link back to your web site, I think most people would prefer to keep this link indexed and followed so I am not going to make the whole page nofollow.
What I will do is make the internal links to other dates etc. nofollow.