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.

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