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Do You Want Your Ancillary Pages In Googles Index 
By: Michael Gray 2007-10-22 You have to ask yourself this question, is there information on any of those pages that I want someone to be able to search for in a search engine? I really cant think of too many good reasons youd want your terms of service or privacy policy in any of the search engines. Do you want your contact us page in the search engine, if its just an email form probably not.
However if you have a physical address, or phone number on the page you certainly would. If you do have a physical address and phone and want it in the index, Id make the argument that it should be on all of your pages, not just your contact page, but I digress. Is there anything on your about us page you think someone might search for then yes. If its just a bunch a fluff, filler and blah blah copy then no. Location is a bit trickier, if you have one location you dont really need a dedicated location page. If you have few locations, then yes youll want the page indexed. If you have so many locations you need a DB/zip code inquiry or a large map then you dont want the page in the index. You should however really strive to get a machine readable listing of all your locations it will improve your local search results tremendously. Hopefully now that youve got a better idea of what pages you do and dont want in the index, so lets talk about implementation. The complicated thing here is each engine handles things a bit differently, so youve got to do things like youre from the department of the redundancy department. First off lets talk about common navigation, these pages will probably be on every page in the header footer, and or sidebar. Id put a nofollow tag there. Because no follow only works from internal pages and doesnt prevent what people do from the outside do you should also use the noindex meta tag. To complete the circle you should make sure should also exclude the pages in the robots.txt file. Anytime you play with your robots.txt file you need to be careful its really easy to make a mistake and send things into a tailspin. So double and triple check your work or better yet use Google Webmaster Central to make sure you didnt screw something up. Ok since theres a bit of brain power involved, and theres the potential to really screw things up, is it worth even monkeying with? Absolutely. As I mentioned above each of these pages is almost certainly going to be linked to from the header.footer/sidebar of most if not all of your pages. That kind of interlinkage is going to create powerful internal page with lots of page rank. Since every site has a limited amount of page rank you have to decide is worth squandering some of that page rank on non money pages that people are never going to be searching for? For me thats a pretty easy answer, I like the ability to be able to sculpt to some extant the flow of page rank within my website. So now youre thinking hmm clearly this falls firmly into the hey I actually have to do some work category and youre wondering why not just skip the whole thing and pull the pages from your site entirely. That would be a mistake as well. If you look at the January 2006 Google Librarian newsletter youll see Google recommends librarians look for things like an about us or credentials page to help them determine if a website is credible or not. I havent seen any evidence to prove or disprove that Google is looking for about us or privacy policy pages in an automated way and factoring it into the algorithm. However the thing to keep in mind is these ancillary pages are made for people, and since Google claims they have over 5,000 spam raters who know how to file spam reports, having those ancillary pages is a pretty easy way to look more authentic. There you have it, hopefully I cleared things up so you can understand it a bit better. Things like this are small little changes that help you focus your website just a little bit more. By itself something like this may not do much, but combined with other things the effect becomes cumulative and can make a world of difference. Comments Tag: Google, SEO, SEM Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org. |
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