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Wordpress plugin for NoIndex? (and a lesson for newbs on why)

by Chris Thompson
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey fellow WordPress users,

Ok like most of you I'm using WordPress along with the All-In-One-SEO plugin. I love it and I don't want to change it. But I have run into a problem where Id like to have certain pages with NoIndex in the meta data. This popular plugin that so many of us use does not allow you to create NoIndex tags per page.

To make sure this thread helps people who don't understand, here are the reasons I need this:

1) NoIndex is a TAG that goes in your header, it tells Google not to index the specific page.

2) There are plenty of times when a marketer does NOT want pages indexed by Google. The most obvious (which apply to me) are:
  • Thank you pages, such as after a customer opts-in and gets a freebie from you. You don't want that freebie to be public
  • Special sales pages where special pricing is given. You don't want everyone to be able to find it
  • Avoid duplicate content penalty. The duplicate content penalty is something that matters WITHIN YOUR SITE ONLY. Say you have 40 landing pages that are mostly the same but keyword optimized for slightly different keyworkds, and you are using Adwords (PPC) to send traffic, you would NOT want to index these pages because Google would see them as too similar and you'd get slapped with a duplicate content penalty.
I hope that explanation helps some of you. Now does anyone have a simple plugin suggestion that handles JUST the NoIndex / NoFollow and not otherwise duplicate the SEO functions of All-In-One-SEO?
#lesson #newbs #noindex #plugin #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author Leanne King
    Hi Chris, Platinum SEO is by the guys that originally developed All In One SEO it has the function that you refer to. If you don't want to give up AIOS then I'd recommend the no index plugin by Yoast Meta Robots WordPress plugin - Yoast - Tweaking Websites works perfectly with AIOS.

    Hope that helps
    Leanne
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Thompson
    That's awesome! I saw it yesterday quickly while searching, and I didn't realize it was the solution I wanted. I got confused and thought it was for creating a robots.txt file .. silly me.
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  • Profile picture of the author bgmacaw
    Originally Posted by Chris Thompson View Post

    [*]Avoid duplicate content penalty. The duplicate content penalty is something that matters WITHIN YOUR SITE ONLY. Say you have 40 landing pages that are mostly the same but keyword optimized for slightly different keyworkds, and you are using Adwords (PPC) to send traffic, you would NOT want to index these pages because Google would see them as too similar and you'd get slapped with a duplicate content penalty.
    From a SEO perspective, there is no duplicate content penalty in this case but a duplicate content filter. Google understands that scripts like WordPress and some ecommerce sites automatically produce on-site duplicate content. Since this is done for users, not search engine manipulation, they're OK with and won't penalize you for using the features of a perfectly legit script although they will only show one page from your domain in their results in most cases.

    On WordPress sites, Google will almost always index the post page as long as it's the one that pings BlogSearch. It may or may not index category pages or tag pages. If it does index them, then these pages may show up in the search results while your original post page is filtered out because the algorithm considers it less relevant to the search query. Of course, this may not be desirable to you from a landing page perspective. In that case, noindexing or simply not using tags or categories publicly would make sense.
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    • Profile picture of the author The Expert
      I think there is a plugin called "Headspace" (or "Headspace 2") that allows you tweak the header of any page to your hearts content.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gail Sober
    Just use a robots.txt file
    The Web Robots Pages

    It's not a perfect solution but the bots that will obey your meta tag will obey the robots.txt file

    A bad bot will obey neither
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Thompson
    Robots.txt is probably OK. It's not ideal because anyone can look at your file and see what you are disallowing. Anyone.
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  • Profile picture of the author InternetMarketingIQ
    The solution has already been given. Use Platinum SEO plug in.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gail Sober
    Oops, sorry Chris. I missed where you had already ruled out the robots.txt in a previous post.

    Platinum SEO looks very good. Going to have to give it a go myself.
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