noindex,nofollow

Suggestions and ideas to make Beds24.com better
markkinchin
Site Admin
Posts: 935
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 1:43 pm

I've done some more reading on this and the more I read the less sure I am.

There is a good article at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
In particular the section "Control internal PageRank flow"

The thing is, the links on the booking page are dynamic internal links intentionally there for the convenience of the visitor.
I am concerned adding nofollow on those links is against the intention of the nofollow tag.
In particular I don't want to do anything that Google may intemperate as "manipulating internal PageRank".
Epicea_old
Posts: 74
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 3:14 pm

You can ignore the a lot of the stuff on the wiki page, it's complete nonsense. SEO experts are basically high priests of some sort of cargo cult :roll:

The comments about internal pagerank flow are gibberish. Fortunately, it doesn't make any difference if it's rubbish or not because I'm asking that the iframe is made <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="nofollow">. I had particular reasons for making that request rather than altering every link nofollow and this was one of those reasons.

Our logs are full of robots now, these are robots that don't identify themselves properly using the user agent. They are not getting there by ignoring nofollow directives, any robot that ignores nofollow on our site get's killed and blacklisted instantly.

The one link back to your own site isn't going to make any difference to SEO so there's no real reason to struggle to preserve it. In fact, it's a circular, reciprocating link so it counts for nothing, Google are wise to that trick.

Surely the best way to proceed would be to simply make in an option? ie

instead of :

Code: Select all

https://www.beds24.com/booking.php?propid=XXX&referer=XXXXX&advancedays=1&numchild=0&numadult=2&lang=en&width=1020&numdisplayed=10&numnight=2&hidename=yes&hidedesc=no&hidefooter=yes&type=0
have

Code: Select all

https://www.beds24.com/booking.php?propid=XXX&referer=XXXXX&advancedays=1&numchild=0&numadult=2&lang=en&width=1020&numdisplayed=10&numnight=2&hidename=yes&hidedesc=no&hidefooter=yes&type=0&follow=0
where follow defaults to TRUE.

This isn't particularly relevant to most people, I'm fairly sure it's only an issue for using the embedded iframe version which works best with a secure site.
markkinchin
Site Admin
Posts: 935
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 1:43 pm

OK the "follow=0" parameter is an elegant way to deal with this, the booking page now accepts this option.
Epicea_old
Posts: 74
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2012 3:14 pm

That's great, I'll watch the logs and see if robot behaviour improves.
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