Replacing a NoIndex page?

[Vithe]

When you search for my company name, we come up 1st and 2nd in Google. All good, you might think, but the 2nd result that comes up is our terms and conditions which, whilst reassuring for customers, would probably be more effective as a sales page.

Now, I am considering putting a noindex, nofollow, noarchive tag on the page, which I believe should stop the terms and conditions coming up in the results. However, there is also a very similarly named site which is unrelated to us but which we don't want our customers to confuse us with. Basically, we don't want them to take 2nd position.

My question is: how likely is it that we will regain 2nd position with one of our other pages if I do put the noindex tag on the terms and conditions page? I totally understand that there aren't any certanties in this kind of thing, but any ideas are much appreciated.

This isn't something I have done before so I'd like to get the experiences of the experts out there!

Cheers.

[incrediblehelp]

I would never block content from ranking in the SERPs. I would rather focus on making changes on the page itself to better suit your needs.

[Vithe]

Thanks for your reply. I guess it makes more sense to capitalise on the advantage I already have than throw it away and hope that it goes my way.

[crtbs]

Create a sitemap with all the pages from your website, and assign a lower priority to "Terms and conditions" and "Privacy Policy" (0.1 for example) and higher priority to pages that you consider more important (1 for index, 0.9 for sales/services, 0.8 for products, etc.).

This is the best way to tell the search engines wich pages are more important and which not.

I hope this helped you.

Good luck.

Chris.

[Vithe]

Ah that's really useful, thanks a lot Chris. I had no idea you could even do that, but it is just what I was after.