Question on rel="nofollow"

[Meinolf Müller]

Hello,

when using rel="nofollow" within <a href="url/path/page.html" rel="nofollow">Link</a> regarding behaviour of Google:

Is "page.html" indexed by Google and only deeper links within "page.html" aren't followed or does it mean that "page.html" is ignored completely?

Thanks for your information.

Meinolf

 

[Ingolme]

All it means is that Google will not follow the link, but unless the page itself has a noindex meta tag or is blocked by robots.txt Google can still index it. The nofollow link is usually used for links to external websites.

[Meinolf Müller]

On 5/19/2018 at 10:13 AM, Ingolme said:

... Google can still index it.

Hello, thanks,

can he or will he?

[Ingolme]

Google will index the page when it finds it.

[Meinolf Müller]

On 5/20/2018 at 7:59 PM, Ingolme said:

Google will index the page when it finds it.

Do you mean "when it finds it" directly from the given link or if the url is referenced thru another path within the site?

The reason I put those questions is, that some people don't understand what I mean. They tell me, that you and they do mean the same, but say, that the link defined with rel="nofollow" is only indexed, when reachable thru another path, e.g. thru sitemap.

Regards Meinolf

[dsonesuk]

Any link from other site pages , menu, sitemap or external website pages that link to a page, the bots will attempt to visit that page. You may have 'nofollow/noindex' in 'robots' meta tag or have file robot.txt denying all bots to a page through these, but! Unfortunately not all bots follow these set rules.

[Ingolme]

5 hours ago, Meinolf Müller said:

Do you mean "when it finds it" directly from the given link or if the url is referenced thru another path within the site?

The reason I put those questions is, that some people don't understand what I mean. They tell me, that you and they do mean the same, but say, that the link defined with rel="nofollow" is only indexed, when reachable thru another path, e.g. thru sitemap.

Regards Meinolf

Google will not find it through that specific link, but it is most likely capable of finding the page through other means. If you have a page that's public on the internet, Google's crawler will usually find a way to it. If you want to prevent Google from indexing the page, as I said before, use robots.txt or the meta robots tag to indicate that you don't want it indexed.