SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make

[Max]

Andy Beard wrote a really good post today on SEO Linking. I highly recommend everyone to read it. It explains in details about PR juice flow, nofollow, meta and robots.txt attributes' affect on it. The most important - he points out wrong perseption of it by other "experts".

[Mike Taylor]

Thanks for the heads up Max. That was a very informative article.

[bigtoe]

I have never understood why someone would create a page and then use a tag to keep the bots out. This article justifies my doubts about the practice.

On another forum they were talking about the value of blocking their forms. Said it was a waste of juice, but I have forms that show up in the searches. Good use of juice.

If it is not worthy of the bots it is not worthy of my site.

[Max]

Originally Posted by bigtoe

I have never understood why someone would create a page and then use a tag to keep the bots out. This article justifies my doubts about the practice.

On another forum they were talking about the value of blocking their forms. Said it was a waste of juice, but I have forms that show up in the searches. Good use of juice.

If it is not worthy of the bots it is not worthy of my site.

Well, there are can be many cases why you would want to block bots from indexing your pages or especially forms. Let's say you have multiple cities that you represent, and you want to generate leads from each page, by linking to different forms. I'm not gonna come up with a reason why would you have to have separate forms, but let's say you do. Now, all the forms looking exactly the same and there is no enough content on the form pages to really make them unique for the search engines. This is where the blocking comes in handy. You city pages will be the juice pages that will rank, but then they will link to a form page which doesn't have unique content.

As for the forms in general... they are not that unique... how many contact forms you can come up with? There are thousands of web sites that will have pretty much exactly the same contact forms, home value forums etc. etc. If there is no enough of unique content on those pages and the pages are not ranking for you at all... that may be the case as well.

Anyway, this article explains how to calculate your steps in web architecture, or at least gives you good ideas about it, and the most important - it tells you how to do it correctly. NoIndex, NoFollow in the meta tags and robots.txt is not enough to stop the juice flow, and many people around don't know that.