[Pro] robots command?

Freeway
1

I’m trying to improve a client’s organic search results on Google and I’m having a heck of time. I’ve read through various SEO books, but nothing seems to work.

I’ve noticed that his competitors’s website, which ranks really high, uses both the robot and googlebot commands. Do either of these meta tags help? If os, what’s the proper format?

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2

Any thoughts on this?

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3

The robots.txt file or robots meta tags are mostly useful for keeping the honorable bots out of private pages. I’m not aware of them being able to elevate the status of your pages all that much. Even if you add a comment there saying “this page updates a lot, come back and visit often”, they really follow their own counsel.

What will improve your client’s standing in the SEO wars is:

  1. Deep content on a single topic per page, lovingly presented in HTML text, organized with headers and lists, and links out to additional information on various sub-topics.
  2. Lots of inbound links from a wide range of trusted referrers.
  3. Time. Lots of time.

I would use the Site Map Action to create an XML sitemap, and upload it to all the search engines (except Yahoo, who have gone out of that business and are merely pimping for Bing these days). That’s good stuff, and lets you present the pages you want the bots to see in a nice package with a bow.

Walter

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4

So if I don’t use the “no-follow” command do I even need a robots metatag at all?

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5

If you have certain pages that you’d rather didn’t leak out to Google et al, you can add certain no-index no-follow flags, either in a robots.txt file or a robots meta tag. You can read all about this at http://robotstxt.org

There are a few things this is good for, but getting deeper SEO coverage is probably not one of them.

You will see a lot of cargo-cult thinking around SEO. People will do (and sell, and buy) the strangest things trying to get ranked higher. Desperate people, a fool and his money, etc.

Patience, grasshopper, and spin your Rolodex and get some PR happening. Getting the local newspaper or television station to write a story about the site will have enormous SEO bump, since you will end up linked from a seriously visited, indexed hourly, authoritative like you can’t believe link-fest of a Web site.

Walter

On Feb 15, 2012, at 11:17 PM, RavenManiac wrote:

So if I don’t use the “no-follow” command do I even need a robots metatag at all?

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6

Good info Walter. Thank you.

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7

Is it better to use the robot metatag no-index, no-follow on pages other than your client’s home page to control the landing page?

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8

You can’t control, nor do you want to control, the landing page. Each page in your site rises and falls on the strength of its own unique content, and no two searchers are going to use the same terms or be interested in the same part of your total content. Hopefully, your design makes it clear to the visitor who drops in at a random corner of your site exactly how to find home, and where they are in the larger picture.

Walter

On Feb 16, 2012, at 10:45 AM, RavenManiac wrote:

Is it better to use the robot metatag no-index, no-follow on pages other than your client’s home page to control the landing page?

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9

Yes, it’s pretty clear. I was just wondering.

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10

Is it better to use the robot metatag no-index, no-follow on pages other than your client’s home page to control the landing page?

This will stop them indexing all the pages apart from the index page. So NO - not a good idea.

David

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