Invalid nofollow value for rel attribute. When you can't do without noindex and nofollow. What is the impact of rel nofollow and the noindex tag?

Both nofollow and noindex tags work great when they are in close proximity. Here is an example of their use:

Link text

Designing a link in this way will help you maintain the weight of the page and, moreover, the Yandex search bot will not see the anchor. In conclusion, it must be said that you do not need to close the link's noindex tag, thus you only prohibit indexing of the anchor, but not the link itself. One nofollow attribute will be enough for it.

Good day, dear readers. I often come across the fact that many novice webmasters and bloggers are completely confused about the use of noindex and nofollow. Let's figure out what it is, what it's eaten with, and dot the i's.

It’s worth starting with so that in the future you never get confused in your head that both noindex and nofollow are used in two relatively different meanings in a web document.

The robots meta tag is responsible for the entire page. Using this meta tag, you can prohibit or allow indexing of page content.

Noindex is responsible for prohibiting indexing of text on the page.

Nofollow is responsible for preventing the indexing of links on a page.

These values ​​are used as follows:

which means that this page cannot be indexed at all.

There may also be the following values:

you can index the content, but ignore the links on the page, i.e. don't index them.

You can read more about the robots meta tag in my article.

The rel attribute shows the relationship of this document to the document being referenced.

In this case, by setting the rel attribute to nofollow, we are asking the search engine not to click on the external link, and we are also emphasizing that we are not responsible for the content that we link to.

Links designed with this value do not convey the authority of our page, in other words, the TCI and Page Rank are not transmitted. However, it is also worth considering that in the case of PR, the weight still goes, but not to the site to which we link, but to nowhere in the literal sense of the word. Regarding the TCI, there is no exact information on whether the weight is lost or remains on the site.

Let's take a closer look at the distribution and transfer of weight to Google.

So, it doesn’t matter at all how many links you have have the attribute and how many do not. If there are 10 links on a page, then each link will receive part of the authority of your page, and each of them will transfer this weight, but if in one case the weight is transferred to a specific site, then in another case the weight will simply go to nowhere.

Let's imagine a little how a search engine sees the World Wide Web. All sites are interconnected by links, absolutely everything. The first refers to the second, the second to the third... the thousandth to the thousand and one and some million in the end will definitely refer to the first.

Thus the chain is closed, all sites are in a loop, and the weight that the first site transfers always returns to it through hundreds and thousands of other sites. We also don’t forget, and I already wrote about this in, that this weight is transferred not just once, but constantly, and over time the weight only becomes larger, increasingly increasing its authority. It is on this principle that website linking is built.

Now imagine that the first site closed its links with the . The weight will not transfer to the second site, but will flow into nowhere, and the second site will not receive that part of the weight that it should have, will not be able to transfer it further along the chain, and as a result, having gone through the entire cycle, X is some site that should was to transfer the weight to the first site, it will transfer it in significantly less quantity than it could. So, each time you don’t receive that part of the weight that you yourself throw into nowhere by closing your links with the attribute, the site cannot transfer it to you, which means that by closing your links, you deprive yourself of increasing weight, and such an indicator as PR

To make this easier to understand, let's imagine that each link conveys a weight equal to one.

Thus, if the first site did not close the link with the attribute, then at the end of the cycle it will receive more weight from incoming links than if outgoing links are closed.

Closing a link is not profitable if you really, truly recommend to your readers the article you are linking to, your page on a social network, or your RSS feed. It’s stupid to close links to your own pages on social networks when you recommend that your readers subscribe to blog updates through them. After all, these are your own pages, your own RSS feed, which broadcasts your own content. Aren't you responsible for it yourself?

But there are situations when it is really necessary to close links with the nofollow value. Let's turn to the sources, Yandex and Google, what do they say about this?

In addition to this, Google recommends marking selling links with the attribute. Google also writes that using nofollow we can point the robot to closed sections of our site, but clarifies that there are other ways to indicate this.

Let's not invent our own standards, but turn to the existing ones that are being developed by the international organization W3C.

So, we found out when it is worth using the link attribute and when it is not advisable. We will also no longer be inserting it anywhere except in one single tag indicating the link. Now let's pay attention to the noindex tag.

Once upon a time, Yandex did not understand the meaning of nofollow, and therefore came up with its own tag

something inside

so that you can close unwanted links with its help. Everything that was inside this tag was ignored by the Yandex robot. But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, Yandex has matured and began to understand the . This happened back in the spring of 2010. That's when the noindex tag lost its value as a link-closing tool. But at the same time, another meaning remains - to hide text content. Excerpt from the Yandex Help section:

They are recommended to hide service areas of the text. It is not entirely clear what service areas we are talking about, but it is quite obvious that this tag now has nothing to do with links. Those. it turns out if we place the link in this tag:

You can safely refuse to use this tag, especially considering its invalidity. After all, in fact, such a tag does not exist at all. As we know, HTML standards are developed by the international organization W3C, and there is no such tag in the specification for the HTML language; this is completely an invention of Yandex.

There is one more question that I would like to draw your attention to. Often, when I try to explain what I wrote about in this article, people object to me:

“I analyze the site with such and such a tool, and it shows me that my links are not closed...

You can trust all these tools, this is your full right, but isn’t it better to believe the official documentation of search engines, and isn’t it better to think with your own head?

Good luck with website optimization.

The Yandex search robot “walks” through sites, views and analyzes their content, and then saves a pointer to text and images in the Yandex search database. This process is called indexing. Part of a web page can be blocked from indexing by placing it inside an element. Then, the next time you visit the web page, the search robot will ignore such content and will not add it to its database. This is done for various reasons, for example, links that are closed from indexing do not transmit the TIC (thematic citation index).

It is important to understand that this is a non-standard element and was invented by Yandex for its own purposes. Browsers do not support it in any way and simply display its contents as usual.

If you need to close the entire page for search engines, use the element by adding it to the HTML code:

Or add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Disallow: /private.html

Where is private.html the page address.

...

Required.

noindex

Yandex will not index this text.

The following notations are used in the browser table.

• - the element is fully supported by the browser;
• - the element is not perceived by the browser and is ignored;
• - during operation, various errors may appear, or the element is supported with reservations.

The number indicates the browser version from which the element is supported.

An article for those who are too lazy to read help on GoogleWebmaster and YandexWebmaster

To control the behavior of search robots on a web page, there is a robots meta tag and its attribute content. closing a web page from search indexing,

Tag NoIndex and Yandex

Sometimes, when making some technical changes on the site or blogging for a long time, materials and pieces of code appear that can harm. In this article I will touch, first of all, Yandex and describe its “specific” HTML tag .

What's the point here anyway? As you know, the following must be taken into account:

But if there are (or appear over time) texts or codes that negatively affect these 2 points, then promotion may worsen.

There could be a lot of things here:

• pieces non-unique text you took from someone else's site and inserted into yours unique(originally) article,
• an abundance of advertising codes - teasers, banners, and others,
• many JavaScript scripts and flash application codes,
• different blocks of links in the sidebar like “our friends”,
• a bunch,
• and etc.

Based on the two list items indicated at the beginning of the article, it affects this way:

Therefore, it would be a good idea to block all unnecessary parts of materials from indexing by search robots.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), only Yandex allows you to block certain sections of HTML code from indexing. Perhaps, over time, Google and Bing will also offer something similar. Or maybe their developers simply don't consider it necessary.

In general, there is no noindex tag in Google! - I especially point out this because the Internet is full of conversations on this matter. But the Google search engine allows you to hide the entire page from robots through, as well as using standard means - like other PSs:

It is no more difficult to use than any other HTML tag. It usually looks like this:

Some of that No need give to Yandex

An alternative option is also possible - the noindex tag in the form of a standard HTML comment. Here, for example, is how you can hide context from AdSense:

AdSense is “wrapped” in noindex tag

- i.e. everything is the same, but we add an indication that this is a comment. In my opinion, this option is preferable.

By the way, to find out where the noindex tag blocks are located on a web page, you can put:

They will literally “highlight” sections of code “wrapped” in this tag. True, RDS bar sometimes does not highlight the option in comment format - – – noindex – – > .

As I wrote above, noindex in Yandex is needed to hide unnecessary pieces of code so that The uniqueness of texts and the relevance of articles to queries did not decrease. It would be quite logical if the thought arises close everything except the text of the optimized article in the noindex tag— including in the top menu, site header, comments, etc.

In fact, it's not worth accelerating like that. There are two reasons for this:

• Such manipulations (if overdone) can be considered by Yandex.
• The robots of modern PS are able to distinguish where, for example, the block with an article is located, and where the comments to it are. Yandex can too- about 10 months ago I personally found out this from them, because... I planned to close all blocks with comments in Noindex.

With the comments it turns out quite interesting - search engines like lots of comments, because this indicates . Therefore, you don’t have to worry that commenters’ texts will reduce the relevance of the article to the query - it’s better to think about them.

Also, in my opinion, it is better to close AdSense blocks from the “eyes” of Yandex (like any other advertising codes) - so that this search engine does not consider your site “too” advertising and does not apply it. BUT leave it open.

The point is that YAN accepts only high-quality resources from the point of view of Yandex, therefore, the presence of this advertisement can hint to this PS about the “quality” of your project and increase such an abstract characteristic.

One time (when Yandex didn't support nofollow), unwanted ones had to be “wrapped” in and additionally added to the link tag rel=’nofollow’, i.e. the entire code of the closed link could look like this:

Closing links in Yandex via nouindex

Now this PS supports nofollow and you can do without “wrapping” the link in and use the standard nofollow technique. Read more about the Rel=nofollow attribute.

It seems that this is all that can be said about the Noindex tag and Yandex. Keep all this in mind and use it wisely