Index/Nofollow Balance

Why It Matters

• It shapes what appears in search results. Without proper directives, search engines may index login pages, admin panels, paginated archives, and other pages that provide no value to searchers — while potentially missing the pages that do.
• It controls authority distribution. When every page passes authority equally and links flow to low-value pages, your important content gets diluted. Strategic use of nofollow on certain links keeps authority concentrated where it helps the most.
• It prevents duplicate content issues. Filtered product listings, URL parameters, and print-friendly versions of pages can create dozens of near-identical indexed pages. Noindex directives prevent these duplicates from competing with your primary pages.
• Mistakes are hard to spot. An accidental noindex tag on your homepage or a nofollow on your main navigation can be devastating — and these errors often go undetected for weeks because the page still loads normally for users.

How to Get It Right

1. Index your valuable content pages. Blog posts, product pages, service pages, landing pages, and any page with unique, useful content should be indexable. These are the pages you want people to find through search.
2. Noindex low-value and utility pages. Thank you pages, search results pages, filter/sort variations, login pages, privacy policy pages (depending on strategy), and paginated archives are good candidates for noindex.
3. Keep "follow" on noindexed pages. When you noindex a page, search engines still need to follow its links to discover other pages. Use "noindex, follow" rather than "noindex, nofollow" unless you specifically want to block link authority from flowing through that page.
4. Use dofollow on editorial internal links. Your internal links are how authority flows through your site. Keep links between your own content pages as dofollow so search engines can discover and value them properly.
5. Audit your directives regularly. Check that important pages are not accidentally noindexed and that nofollow is not applied where it should not be. CMS updates, template changes, and plugin installations can silently alter these settings.

Common Mistakes

• Accidentally noindexing important pages. A stray meta robots tag, an inherited directive from a template, or a plugin misconfiguration can noindex critical pages without anyone noticing until organic traffic drops.
• Using noindex when canonical is better. For duplicate content, a canonical tag often makes more sense than noindex. Canonical says "this version is the original" and consolidates authority, while noindex removes the page from results entirely.
• Nofollowing all external links reflexively. Linking to authoritative external sources with dofollow is natural and healthy. Over-nofollowing every outbound link creates an unnatural link profile.
• Setting noindex, nofollow together by default. Blocking both indexing and link following on a page means search engines cannot index it or follow its links. This is appropriate for strictly private pages but wasteful for pages that link to valued content.