meta tags on non significant pages

[pagetta]

This may seem like a silly question, but this SEO lark is proving to be such a minefield I though i would ask for some advice before I go ahead and make changes...

We have a lot of downloads on our site, where you fill in personal details in order to download product information. If these download pages were to appear in the SERPs, they would be useless, as there would be no referrer to specify a file to download, so I do not want people entering the site at this point. For this reason I was going to remove ALL meta and alt tags just to make sure they don't suddenly pop up in the search results somewhere.

But I just want to check, would this change make a difference to my site's performance in the SERPs as a whole? or would it just affect the pages I have removed the tags from?

thanks :-)

[KeithO]

It should only effect those pages. But wouldn't using a robots.txt file be a more effective idea?

[kgun]

1. Bots respecting robots.text.
2. Bots not respecting robots.txt.
3. Bots not respecting robots.txt but indexing based on meta tags. (Perhaps not probable).

Gary Joel Keith's site (also from Florida) is my preferred authority on this subject.

http://www.garykeith.com/browsers/downloads.asp

http://techpatterns.com/downloads/spider_blocking.php

http://www.iplists.com/

But if she only cares about GoogleBot, MSNbot, YhaooBot etc. her method should be good enough. These bots index sites based on metatags.

<digression>
Is it possible to make an object (class) that encapsulates the IP address? Then only Bots on a secure list are allowed access to the site. If it is possible to encrypt the object, that should be even more secure. I am only thinking. Is there a person with Peter Nortons knowledge here?
</digression>

[greeneagle]

Pagetta,

Is this a real problem according to your stats?

Ken

[Mac 5]

I agree robots.txt file and
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow">

[pagetta]

no not a massive problem, just something I wanted to ask about. Will put a robots txt file in place, thanks

[kgun]

Very easy to modify it:

http://www.multifinanceit.com/robots.txt


It is divided in two parts:

The first is allowed.

The second part starting with Disallow is disallowed.

Once again, I reccomend

http://www.garykeith.com/browsers/downloads.asp

Robots.txt Checker

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-...l?checkreferer

Example:
http://www.multifinanceit.com/robots.txt

Analyzing file http://www.multifinanceit.com/robots.txt
No errors found in this robots.txt file

[just-trying-to-help]

Not that I am a big believer in PR, but this is my story on robots.txt and no index nofollow.

Have a site with about a hundred pages.
approximately 50 of these pages offer little in robot food and never have hits(FLASH).

Decided to disallow in robots.txt and also added noindex nofollow in tags,

A week later the rest of my site started receiving about 200+ more hits a day.

Why, my guess is I was giving away my hard earned PR/vote/importance or whatever else you want to call it in the SEO world to worthless pages(in google's eyes).

Will it work for you, I would imagine but I am no Google junkie to know for sure.

So, if the pages are useless bot food, do it and see what happens.

[khurramali]

I think i should also add the use of Goolge 'nofollow' tag to be included in your urls to better distribute the page rank in your site.

[kgun]

1. Default for all good bots.
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
So if you do not have these tags, the good Bots will follow links and index pages.

2. There is a special tag for GoogleBot.
Example:
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="index,follow,archive">

Archive will archive pages.

3. Robots.txt is the first step.

4. .htaccess the next
Example:
http://www.multifinanceit.com/htaccess.txt
http://www.multifinanceit.com/htaccess1.txt

Instructions on how to:
http://techpatterns.com/downloads/spider_blocking.php

5. Study these

http://www.garykeith.com/browsers/downloads.asp

resources or start here.