Google's NOINDEX Policy Discussion:
The latest post from Matt Cutts comes as a policy discussion about NOINDEX and how Google should treat the NOINDEX meta tag.
Different search engines have been found to handle the “NOINDEX” meta tag differently:
· Google doesn’t show the page in any way
· Ask doesn’t show the page in any way
· MSN shows a reference Cached link and url, but no summary. Clicking the cached link doesn’t return a page.
· Yahoo! shows a reference to the url and Cached link, but no summary. Clicking on the cached link returns the cached page.
The question now arises whether Google should completely drop a NOINDEX’ed page from its search results vs. show a reference to the page, or something in between? The three different scenarios have been deliberated upon:
Completely drop a NOINDEX’ed page
Google has implemented this policy for several years, and webmasters have become adjusted to this policy. The NOINDEX meta tag gives a way to completely remove all traces of a site from Google, however there's also the Google url removal tool. Sometimes it happens that Google sees a link to a page 'A' but doesn’t actually crawl the page, it won’t know that page 'A' has a NOINDEX tag and then it might show the page as an uncrawled url. There’s however a remedy for that: currently, Google allows a NOINDEX directive in robots.txt and it will completely remove all matching site urls from Google. At the same time, this behavior could change based on the policy discussion about it.
Sometimes Webmasters harm themselves by using NOINDEX, but if a site’s traffic from Google is very low, the webmaster might want to diagnose the issue themselves. Furthermore, Google could add a NOINDEX check into the webmaster console to help webmasters self-diagnose if they’ve removed their own site with NOINDEX. Moreover, the NOINDEX meta tag serves a useful role that’s different than robots.txt.
Show a link/reference to NOINDEX’ed pages
Google believes that its highest duty is towards the users, as against an individual webmaster. So, when a user does a navigational query and Google doesn’t return the right link because of a NOINDEX tag, it hurts the user experience. In case a webmaster wants to be out of Google's index completely, they can use Google’s url removal tool. At times Google has seen some sites accidentally remove themselves from the engine. An example is that if a webmaster adds a NOINDEX meta tag to finish a site and then forgets to remove the tag, the site will stay out of Google until the webmaster realizes what the problem is. Moreover, Google recently saw a host of high-profile Korean sites not returned in Google because they all have a NOINDEX meta tag.
Eg.
The contention is that because these high-profile sites aren’t showing up in Google because of the NOINDEX meta tag, it's bad for users and hence for Google.
The Middle ground in between
A majority of webmasters who use NOINDEX do so deliberately and use the meta tag correctly, such as for parked domains that they don’t want to show up in Google. Users are most disheartened when they search for a well-known site and can’t find it. So how about the alternative that Google treats NOINDEX differently if the site was well-known. For example, if the site was in the Open Directory, then show a reference to the page even if the site used the NOINDEX meta tag, otherwise, don’t show the site at all. In this way even though the majority of webmasters could remove their site from Google, but Google would still return higher-profile sites when users searched for them.
You might want to cast your vote on the policy discussion, here at where Matt Cutts asks: What Should NOINDEX do? .
Internet Marketing Specialist Gerry Grant
Qualifications – Search Optimization Marketing Master
Internet business knowledge obtained as Founder/CEO Search-Optimization.com one of the oldest search marketing firms started in 1994 located in Orange County, California. Broad range of Internet marketing skills includes search engine optimization, E-Marketing, web site design, analysis, promotion and maintenance. Gerry is also a public speaker, reporter and organizes Meetup groups.
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