SEO - noindex, nofollow and canonical tag

Question

I need some explanation about my question.

Example on my header already added

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

Should I add canonical tag again to my header?

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=big-fish” />

Let me know :)

canonical tag

Update

we know canonical tag is currently also supported by google, yahoo and live search. How about noindex and nofollow? yahoo and live (bing) supported too?

Answer 1

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (Live) support noindex and nofollow in the meta directives.

noindex tells the search engines to not bother caching your page for inclusion in their results.

nofollow tells them that you don't want any of the links on the page to be followed.

Adding the canonical tag on the same page won't hurt, but effects are unknown unless you talk with one of the search engineers.

Answer 2

Not much point is there? The search engine isn't going to index your page anyway!

Though I suppose if you're ever going to want it indexed in the future then it would be good practice, though only if the same page content is being accessed via different URLs.

Answer 3

Just to clarify some things once and for good

Implementing this

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

not only tells the bots not to index the pages, but blocks them passing PageRank throughout the links found on the page. But that is not a problem itself. The problem is that such pages become dead end pages, otherwise called "Dangling pages" or "Nodes", which cause a dilute of PageRank, because the juice will be removed from the PR graph.

That said, the optimal meta would be implementing:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive,nosnippet,follow" />

If that page is duplicated, it is a good idea to implement a canonical tag too, linking to the page version you want to have indexed. If not, at least to the most relevant page.

Using the canonical tag alone does not prevent indexing. At least not in all cases. For example, if a page have PR5 which has a canonical link pointing to an identical page which has PR 1, Google can ignore the canonical tag and index the page with PR 5.

So to avoid any misconceptions, the canonical tag is not a 301 redirect. That said, pages with a canonical tag can still accumulate PageRank. It depends who much juice reaches that page.

So again another reason that makes sense adding the "follow" meta robots directive as last.

According to Matt Cutts, Lead of Google's Web Spam Team, just using "noindex" or "noindex,noarchive,nosnippet" without adding the "follow" directive at the end, could be that Googlebot can mess up and not follow the links on that page.

I hope all above helps!

Answer 4

Since you're telling the crawler to not index and don't follow, I don't see why you should use a canonical.

You should use a canonical only if you have the same content under different URLs.

Answer 5

Pages that are included in a Robots.txt file tell the search engines NOT to crawl these pages. However pages in a Robots.txt file can still accrue PageRank and can be indexed in search results, says Matt Cutts.

The NoIndex tag means the search engines can crawl the page and give it PageRank, however the search engines are not to index the page, and it will not show up in the search results. Again, a page with the NoIndex tag can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

A page with a NoFollow tag tells the search engines that yes, this page can be crawled, but don’t show this page at all in Google’s Index, and don’t follow any outgoing links, and no PageRank flows from that page.

Answer 6

You only need the 'canonical' tag if there is more than one way to address a page. For example, if 'http://www.example.com/products/big-fish' and 'http://www.example.com/product.php?item=big-fish' both point to the same page (ie. one is an alias for the other), use 'canonical'.

Answer 7

In the meantime this has been answered by a Google employee, check here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=79b4544fb7e1cb3c&hl=en

Basically use either noindex or canonical.

Answer 8

Summarizing The Art of SEO by Eric Enge & Co book, plus googling articles and forums, I suggest the below. Also basically we suppose that your site uses canonical links to escape duplicate pages problem and all other page URLs with cgi parameters are considered unwanted pages, from the search engine point of view (though fully functional and available for visitors).

1. CANONICAL URL PAGES - PRODUCT, INFO, ARTICLES Allow everything besides non-canonical links (unwanted pages). Doing this we give them no juice and no rating bonuses. Other pages also don't benefit from this. But we keep unwanted pages rating lower and useful pages are higher in search results.

   < a href="mysite.com/catalogue/product.php?id=123" rel="NoFollow" >

2. DUPLICATED PAGES - PRODUCT, PRINT Search engine reads the page code, identifies canonical link in the very beginning, considers it as an equivalent of the useful page and excludes it from index as unwanted. SE robot has read the page, so it still can examine the links. Therefore we forbid following the links on other unwanted pages with non-canonical URLs. To make this page more equivalent to its canonical target we omit other forbidding parameters (canonical tag is sufficient).

   < link rel="canonical" href="mysite.com/catalogue/my-product/" >

   < a href="mysite.com/catalogue/product.php?id=123" rel="NoFollow" >

3. TECHNICAL PAGES - REGISTRATION, BASKET, ORDER Disallow robots reading all these pages to not even get to any tags in page code. But still visitors can reach these pages and robots will find a link on your unwanted page on their site. Therefore we additionally need all forbidding tags to ignore this page by search engines and not to follow links on unwanted pages.

   Disallow:/catalogue/product.* # In robots.txt file.

   < meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive,nocache,nosnippet" />

   < a href="mysite.com/catalogue/product.php?id=123" rel="NoFollow" >

Answer 9

"On indexed pages, use Canonical keyword. On non-indexed pages, use NoIndex."

https://helloacm.com/the-golden-rules-of-removing-duplicate-pages-by-using-noindex-or-canonical/