Magento seo question. Nofollow on top links like cart/login?

Question

Magento seo question. Nofollow on top links like cart/login?

While reading up on seo I thought to add no follows to default links that exist on every page. Cart. Login. Checkout. TC. Faq.

When looking up my site on Google using site:domain I realized that the top pages were the ones that have links in headers and footers.

By adding rel=nofollow to functional links like cart/login/etc all the seo juice is given only to relevant category and content pages (that dofollow).

Question: Is this smart to do seo wise? And how can this be done via xml or Phtml using no follow? Or can it be tackled via robots?

Many thanks ......

Answer 1

Of course, the best practice would be to put nofollow, noindex on the meta tags and maybe exclude the page(s) in robots.txt. It is not really necessary but just to keep it all clean and tidy i would suggest doing it.

Here is a good explanation how to do it, in case you don´t know http://doejo.com/blog/magento-how-to-add-noindex-nofollow-robots-meta-tag-or-change-meta-title-or-description-on-certain-pages/#.VObxGPmG_HU

Answer 2

Personally, I have never nofollowed the cart and login links on my Magento site and have great site SEO, regardless. Though you could certainly robots.txt prevent crawling of those pages, you'll probably get better bang for your SEO buck by tackling some of the other SEO related issues in Magento (such as defining URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools).

Also, unless your site is incredibly large or the site architecture is quite deep, you are likely not reaching your site crawl limit and letting Google crawl those two pages will not prevent other pages on your site from being crawled and indexed properly.

Kaylie

Answer 3

If u have used no follow, that is not a big issue but generally you should avoid using no follow.

Matt Cutts suggested that to use no index instead of no follow for internal pages.

There is not much important to use no follow link, but if you want to use with the help of XML or PhTML, we generally use PhTML method to do no follow and it can be tackled with the robots by using these two steps.

<a href="https://example.com/login">Login</a>
<a rel="nofollow" href="https://example.com/login">Login</a>

Or add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the head section of that page

Answer 4

Beware of @Klettseb answer: If you exclude a page in the /robots.txt the bot is no allowed to read the content of the page and therefore can not read any directives you added to the page.

Better not exclude the page in the robots, add no index to the page and then submit the page in the google search console (fetch as google bot).