4

Basicly, i have a site that i cant remove the

<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />

but i want list of links to be dofollow. If i write rel="dofollow" on each of these href, will they prevail over the meta tag and actually become dofollow or will they remain nofollow?

Ben
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Joan Silverstone
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    Part of me tells me that it should be like CSS, the other tells me that it will actually depends on how the crawler is written. Honestly, I don't know. – Ben Dec 18 '10 at 21:47
  • This almost has to not work, at least for most bots, but if it did work wouldn't it be rel="follow" as it is stated in the link @Brad posted. I tried to test with WebSphinx, but it seems to ignore robots meta tags; at least on localhost. Perhaps this should be tested with the Google Web Master tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/. – fncomp Dec 19 '10 at 02:35

3 Answers3

1

As far as I know, there is no such thing as rel="follow" or rel="dofollow" so adding that to links won't work. It's always assumed that links should be followed unless otherwise specified, not vice-versa.

EDIT: This post from Matt Cutts confirms that "nofollow" always takes priority.

Using robots.txt will not work because that only specifies what pages should be indexed or not. Nofollow, on the other hand, specifies to either ignore a link (if attached to a link), or all links on the page (if used in the meta tag like this question). Nofollowed pages can and will be indexed.

Unfortunately, the only route available to you is fix the broken system that is adding the meta nofollow in the first place.

casperOne
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DisgruntledGoat
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0

no

there just is no

rel=dofollow

, or

rel=follow

dofollow is an idiom for "not nofollow" but not an rel-attribute value of it's own.

Franz Enzenhofer
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-1

You can use robots.txt to determine what directories robots and can't allow. For more information please check http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/robots.shtml

Hope this is what you were looking for.

Brad
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