Post by shikharani00189 on Oct 30, 2024 23:58:20 GMT -6
John Mueller explained in a video hangout that the long-term presence of a "noindex" in web pages can lead Google to also apply a real "nofollow" to the links on these pages . If it is still possible for Google to go to a noindex page, it is simply to be able to follow the links that are not necessarily notified as nofollow. Over time, the situation can therefore change...
In the video below (around the 55 minute mark), John Mueller explains why Google should no longer follow links from noindexed pages. Here is his reported and translated remarks:
It's a little bit complicated with the noindex. I think there's a general off page seo service misconception in the SEO community. In that, with a noindex, it's another case where we see the noindex. Let's say that in a first case, you don't want this page to appear in the search results. We're still going to keep it in our index, we're not going to display it but we can follow its links. But if we see the noindex present for a longer period of time then we think that this page really doesn't want to be used in search, so we'll remove it completely. And therefore we won't follow the links no matter what. So, the case of a noindex follow is kind of the same thing as a noindex, nofollow. In the long run it doesn't make a big difference.
John Mueller explains why Google no longer follows the links of a page that applies a noindex. It's quite logical in short, the engine remains alert when detecting an indexing block and stores the page in its results, then, if the noindex persists, then the page is completely expelled from the index and the links are therefore no longer seen . This is a completely logical behavior that doesn't really surprise me, the case of "noindex, follow" being quite surprising in many cases. From now on, we will know that this behavior must not last under penalty of completely losing the SEO interest of internal links of deindexed pages.
The only relative notion to remember is that this is a long-term treatment . Webmasters then asked John Mueller on Twitter to get an idea of the time frame before such a definitive deletion takes place, but the Google spokesperson only answered: "it depends" . Indeed, depending on the frequency of crawling of a site and the deindexing method (via robots.txt, which is not read at each crawl, or in the meta "robots" tag for example), this can vary. It would seem that this can work for at least a few weeks by taking these parameters into account, but in the long term, the link tracking is completely forgotten since the page is removed from the index...