Noindex vs Nofollow

There’s quite a bit of confusion prevailing in the web community between the meta tags noindex and nofollow. People have been wondering what the implications are for the various combinations. So this post aims to clear this up.

To start off with “index, follow” is the default behavior. The “index” meta tag on a page means that the search engine will include the page in the SERPs. “noindex” means that the page will be dropped from the results only! However, the search engines will crawl it and follow links out of it. It also means that a “noindex” page will accumulate PageRank.

“nofollow” on the other hand means that a search engine will not follow the links on that particular page and will also not allow PR to flow out of it. The page can still be included in the SERPs though. So if you have a blog which say has a lot of archive pages, you might consider using “noindex” on those pages, but not “nofollow” because you want the Search Engines to follow links to to other pages from the archives for easy indexing.

You can also use “nofollow” on individual links to pages like the “Contact us” page where you don’t want the search engines to go and waste link juice. This is a perfectly acceptable practice and Google has publicly stated that “PR sculpting” as it is called is quite ok.

Canonical URLs

style="text-align: justify;Webmasters often face a prickly problem when it comes to people linking to them or when using dynamic URLs. Sometimes, it’s necessary to show the same content using two URLs. For example, a product can be classified in two different ways and depending on the path the user has taken, the URL might be different. Another example, is when an affiliate links to your product with their own identification number in the querystring. A single product page therefore might be accessible via thousands of URLs.

Search engines now have to decide which of these URLs are important and which ones are not. In some cases, it may split the PageRank between URLs – and that’s not a good thing. In others, the bot makes up its own mind based on various parameters. However, Google and other search engines recently came up with the “canonical” tag. Using this, webmasters can specify which URL is the “primary” URL and Google will pass the PageRank to that page.

All you need to do is use the tag like this:"“primary url here> /> . Insert this tag into the head section of your pages and whenever Google accesses the page through another URL, it will know that the real and most important link is the one you have mentioned. Just another example of fine tuning your site to get the most juice!

Using Advanced Segmentation tools in Google Analytics

Google Analytics can be overwhelming at times. Once your traffic begins to cross a certain limit – say a 100 unique visitors a day after removing PPC visits, you need to fine tune that data and figure out the broad classes of visitors that are coming to your site. For example, say you have a particular category X with several products in it. You want to analyze data for only that category. You want to see whether search visits are increasing or decreasing and which keywords are being used to reach it.

With Google Advanced segmentation tools, this is now possible. The best part is, the segmentation parameters need not be restricted to certain pages. You can segment your visitors based on say the time they spend on your site, or only new visitors – or even certain search phrases that contain certain keywords. For example, you can see the trend of visits to your site from all phrases that contain a certain phrase.

The tool is a bit advanced, but even for non professional users, it allows you to play around with the data and take a look at it in many different ways. This is the essence of understanding your customers and gaining insights that can help you serve them better. Try it and see. You’ll be amazed!