Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
If you’re running any kind of website, you should know that Search Engine Optimization is one of the key elements to lots and lots of traffic. Really, there are two sides to Search Engine Optimization. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
…But that’s something completely different to on-page SEO. Today I wanted to talk about on-page SEO and how you can use it to boost search engine rankings and dominate your competition.
Here’s a little information about No-index/No-follow:
For some reason, most people use a “noindex, nofollow” tag as the default “noindex” tag when just using the “noindex” tag alone would be more appropriate. Adding the “nofollow” tag to a page causes all links on that page to be tagged as “nofollow”.
- Noindex nofollow the comment RSS feeds
- Noindex nofollow the search result pages
- Noindex nofollow the login and register pages
- Noindex nofollow all admin pages
- Noindex nofollow the subpages of the homepage
Nofollowing links allows you to stop giving away your Page Rank to external sites. This helps fix duplicate content issues and boosts SEO. Be strategic in using no-index/no-follow tags for better control of your site’s Page Rank distribution.
Tips for improving SEO:
- Use post excerpts in category pages & archive pages
- Redirect 301 non-www to www version of your site
- Use canonical link relevance on your site
- Include only static pages in your Google XML sitemap
That just about covers all of the no-index/no-follow settings and tips I’ve used to increase my Page Rank and boost search engine rankings. If you don’t know anything about SEO you might want to look into it further before you completely change the structure of your site using my instructions. However if you do know a lot about SEO and all of the above makes total sense, use the information as you wish!
In prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments
TyronneRatcliff
Thanks for the tutorial, that’s why I went with the Thesis theme for my blog because it takes care of almost everything you explained in this blog post.
Michael Burns
Thanks for the great information, Dave.
Santiago Rivera
Great post, David! I really appreciate the step-by-step breakdown of on-page SEO. This information is going to be super helpful for my blog. Keep up the awesome work!
Olivia Quinn
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →I’m honestly a bit skeptical. Does using the no-follow and no-index tags really boost SEO rankings? Do you have any specific examples of sites where these changes made a big difference?
Henry Garcia
I have a question about using no-follow tags. Should I apply this to all my internal links as well? Or is it better to only use it for external links?
Sophie Patel
This is an interesting post, but I feel like there are some other strategies that might be more effective than focusing on no-follow tags. Have you explored alternatives like schema markup or improving page load speeds?
Elliot Brooks
Hey David! Thanks for the post. It’s been a while since we last spoke. We should catch up soon! I have some SEO projects I’d love to discuss with you. Let me know when you’re free.
Amara Sullivan
I had a similar issue with duplicate content on my website, and using no-index tags really helped reduce the problem. Your post confirmed a lot of what I learned through trial and error. Thanks for sharing!
Isaac Turner
If anyone is looking for an alternative tool for SEO management, I recommend trying out Ahrefs or Moz. They provide detailed insights into on-page SEO and can complement what David is talking about here.
Talia Ramirez
I learned so much from this post, especially about managing duplicate content issues using no-index tags. I’ll definitely be implementing these tips on my own site. Thanks, David!
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The claim that nofollowing internal admin and login pages ‘boosts SEO’ conflates two different mechanisms: crawl budget conservation and PageRank sculpting. Google stopped treating nofollow as a hint for internal PageRank flow back in 2019, per their own documentation. So the sitemap and canonical tips here still hold, but the nofollow-your-own-login-page advice is arguing from a model that’s several algorithm updates out of date.
Steelmanning the old advice: even if PageRank sculpting is dead, no-indexing thin pages like search results and login screens still keeps low-value pages out of the index. That’s a separate reason to use the tag, mechanism aside.
Reading this whole PageRank thread reminds me of relabeling the diner’s walk-in freezer inventory every single week for nineteen years, convinced it kept the health inspector satisfied. Turned out the inspector never once looked at those labels, only ever checked the temperature log taped to the door. Raj’s point lands the same way here: check what is actually being measured by the algorithm before you build a whole habit, or a whole site structure, around a guess.
Raj’s right that this dates itself. We called it ‘PageRank sculpting’ back in 2008, same idea, same fights about it.