No-Indexing Vs. Disallowing For Website Indexing: When To Use Both
Anyone who is conducting an SEO strategy for their business’s website should know the difference between content search engines want to see and content they don’t want to see. You should be very familiar with your website’s index and how to operate it! When a new page is published on your website, the default setting on most content management systems is to add it to the list of pages that should be indexed. However, there are plenty of examples where you’d want the opposite! Two popular ways of preventing search engines from seeing your pages are the “no-index” and “disallow” functions. We’ll explain the difference between each of them and when you would use them in each case below!
No-Indexing
While you might get confused and think that no-indexing a page and disallowing it are the same thing, they’re fundamentally different in the approach they take to make your content invisible. There are two phases to the way Google analyzes your pages: crawling and indexing. When Google crawls a page, it downloads all of its data. This includes any and all metadata, header tags, images, text, and videos that appear on the page. The second step is indexing, where Google analyzes that data to determine the page’s positioning in search results. No-indexing is exactly what it sounds like: it works essentially like a block feature that prevents Google from analyzing any of the content on a page. While it can still download the content, it can’t use it to determine a page’s position on search. This means that the page won’t show up on search – and it won’t be subject to any penalties! This is a great feature when you have one particular page that you don’t want Google to see. Privacy policy pages, financing pages, and other contractual pages are great examples of pages you wouldn’t want Google to see, and all of these make use of the no-index feature.
Disallowing
As we previously mentioned, crawling and indexing are the two steps necessary to get a page to show up on Google search results. While no-indexing helps to eliminate the indexing part of the equation, disallowing covers the other half. Disallowing prevents Google from crawling the pages. However, there is still a potential that they’re found through other means, such as an internal link on a page that Google has already indexed. “Nofollow” attributes should be placed on pages like this to prevent Google from following links on that page. Disallowing is great if you have a lot of pages on your website that don’t have great SEO value, such as a gallery’s worth of products on an e-commerce website.
Indexing & SEO Management With Boston Web Marketing
Indexing is one of the most crucial aspects of ranking well on search engines, and the talented team at Boston Web Marketing knows how to maximize this for its clients! We’ll ensure that your most important pages put their best foot forward to maximize website traffic and improve lead flow generation. For guaranteed improvements in your business’s online presence, click here to contact us directly!