Does setting a page to no follow negatively effect SEO

  • Resolved slimmyweight

    (@slimmyweight)


    6 years, 5 months ago

    Hi I have alot of pages for courses on my website that I don’t want to be indexed so I have set it so search engines can’t index them but my question is regarding the affects of the “Should search engines follow links on this Post?” option.

    I’ve read and also been told by google support that having to many nofollow links can cause you to be penalized. What exactly does this option do, does it prevent links from the page from being followed or links that lead to it?

    Also can this have a negative effect on SEO would you suggest I allow google to crawl these pages but just set them to not allow search engines to index them?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • If you disabled it from indexing by search engines so you don’t need to worry about incoming links. About outgoing links, you don’t need to opt-in “Should search engines follow links on this Post?” because have no any crawler access this posts so obviously have no any crawler follow the links on the post.

    About being penalized by Google when you have many nofollow links, do you have any official link of Google about that? I believe this is a myth.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Tim Codex.
    Thread Starter slimmyweight

    (@slimmyweight)

    Hi thanks for the reply, I don’t believe it is a myth as I’ve asked in a google forum and one of their support agents mentions something similar also:

    https://productforums.google.com/forum/?pli=1#!topic/webmasters/jbRTHSHLH4A;context-place=mydiscussions

    however I’m unfortunately not getting any clear answers anywhere no one seems to be talking about it in detail.

    Plugin Support devnihil

    (@devnihil)

    @slimmyweight Whether you choose to also set a page that is set to noindex also to nofollow depends on the nature of the links on that page. Google roughly indicates that there are three reasons to nofollow links:

      Untrusted content
      Paid links
      Crawl prioritization

    Comments are an example of an area of content where you would typically not want the links to be followed, as they typically will have links that contain the first two types. We also have more information on what types of pages you may want to set to noindex/nofollow at the following link: https://yoast.com/which-pages-noindex-or-nofollow/

    Plugin Support Michael Ti?a

    (@mikes41720)

    No further response, setting to resolved.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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