Sphinn - Do You Want Your Ancillary Pages in Googles Index?

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Do You Want Your Ancillary Pages in Googles Index?

Went Hot: October 23, 2007 - 8:34 am
Posted By: PPCblogger 354 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.wolf-howl.com)
Category: Google SEO

Do you need 'contact us', 'terms of service' & 'privacy policy' type pages in the search engines index? Graywolf looks at sculpting page rank to the money pages by removing these 'ancillary pages'.

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from bwelford 353 days ago #

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This is a good workmanlike how-to-do-it article that most of us should work on, when we have the time. Of course the fewer pages means less pagerank dilution could be an argument for having fewer web pages with really good value content on a website, rather than multiplying up the pages to get more links. I wonder how that equation works out.

from planetc1 353 days ago #

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If I have an about page that is ranked PR 6, is it suggested to decrease the juice to that page or use the strength of the page to link to other parts of the site? The latter seems easier to do but I'm not sure of its more effective.

from leadegroot 353 days ago #

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Interestingly, Michael Martinez posted almost the exact opposite the following day at

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/10/23/when-site-search-comes-up-short/

I felt, reading it, that he was responding directly to Gray Wolf, without actually referencing the original.

from g1smd 353 days ago #

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I include about us and contact pages in the index for one very good reason.

Last year I needed to contact a company whose name I had forgotten. All I had remembered was the area code of their phone number and a part of the road name.

Google gave me the full contact details at the top spot of the SERPs. I think people worry unecessarily about squeezing the last bit of PR out of their links.

from Halfdeck 352 days ago #

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"To complete the circle you should make sure should also exclude the pages in the robots.txt file. "

Michael is off the mark on this one, though I'm glad to see him blogging about SEO for a change.

If you add a page to robots.txt, guess what? The content doesn't get parsed. So the META NOINDEX and rel=nofollow never gets picked up. Then what happens? Since robots.txt disallowed pages still accumulate PageRank, you're still sending your TOS/Privacy pages tons of juice.

To implement this correctly, don't bother with META NOINDEX. Don't bother with robots.txt. Just use rel=nofollow on *some* links pointing to an ancilliary page.

"Interestingly, Michael Martinez posted almost the exact opposite"

His point would be valid if adding nofollow completely pulled an ancilliary page out of the SERPs. The point is not to block the page out of the index; it's to "borrow" juice from it to reroute it to a page that needs more link love. A "contact us" page is useful, but it will show up in a site: search even if the page was supplemental. Preventing it from getting indexed is counter-intuitive. The key is to borrow 90% of its link juice and give it to some of your money pages stuck in the supplemental index.

"If I have an about page that is ranked PR 6, is it suggested to decrease the juice to that page or use the strength of the page to link to other parts of the site?"

Will the links on your about page benefit users? If not, don't do it.

There's no point in having a TBPR 6 "about us" page. It won't hurt you to reduce that to a TBPR 3 page if in exchange you can dig up 10-20 money pages out of the supplemental index.