SEO Consult Blog

The key to a successful and focused SEO campaign is undoubtedly making the search engines aware of what you don’t want them to crawl on your website. Whether it be entire directories or external links there are ways and means of keeping the power circulating, this is done by robots.txt files, htaccess files, nofollow links and noindex functions.

A robots.txt file is a simple notepad file on the root of your domain, this is also known as an exclusion file and is the place to locate any directories that do not require spidering. Admin, image, pdf and various other folders can be huge in terms of size, and therefore will waste valuable crawling time. This will ensure the pages with potential are noticed and indexed more thoroughly.

The htaccess file is a file that directs one page to another page, a good example of this is when you have a homepage named www.seoconsult.co.uk/ and another called www.seoconsult.co.uk/index.htm, by using the htaccess effectively you can direct one to the other, thus creating one page of combined power.

Nofollow and noindex are functions that can be placed within the a tag. The nofollow will state that any page authority that the link is situated on will not be passed on, improving the strength of the other links that have not been nofollowed. This is useful when linking to external links, keeping the strength within your own site. Noindex is essentially an onpage exclusion function, stating to the search engines which links have pages that are not meant for indexing.

Related posts:

1. Duplicate content
   From an SEO and a Search Engine point of view, content is king and duplicate content is very, very bad. Just like in the real...
2. URL Rewrites and Redirects
   Rewriting your websites URLs is an important and proven method for successful SEO. There are four core reasons for this, they maybe staring you in...
3. Using Redirects On Your Website
   A site redesign is often well complemented with good redirects. A redirect not only redirects human visitors but also the search engine spiders. It isn’t...
4. The Characteristics Of A Good SEO Link
   Link building is not only an important part of search engine optimization, but can drive traffic directly your web pages. Every link should be judged...
5. SEO - Why don’t web developers use Re-directs?
   After working on several websites this week for clients-I am posing the question why don’t web developers and designers utilise permanent redirects. It appears that...