I have a new site with lots of outbound links to content that is on 3rd party domains (all under my control). This content will eventually be brought under the main domain (within a few months), so while the content is on different domains the idea was to use the rel="nofollow" link condom until the content is consolidated under the primary domain.
The site also uses the Google Custom Search engine. Even though the external links are NoFollow'ed we still want to index the content on the other sites for the on-site search engine. Will this NoFollow scheme mess things up for the local search?
Not quite following the problem.
The CSE is set up to return results from all the domains? The other domains are indexed, but the links from the central site are NF?
If the above is correct then it should work. You can always use the advanced options to give more weight to certain domains is that is the issue..
If the other domains have no other links and are not indexed (& you want to keep them that way) then you might be stuck as it does use the main crawl/index. Maybe a different search service?
It think you've got it.
The issue was they didn't want the other domains indexed. That was the thinking with the NoFollow use.
However, I was told afterwards that they also did want to search the content with Google CSE.
Right now I'm wondering whether the NoFollow on these links is going to perform any function at all given the reliance on Google CSE.
Ah, they're stuck then. Cse needs the sites to be Indexed.
Maybe block the sites in robots and then find an alternative search product.
For the record, nofollow does not prevent indexing
I was wondering whether you might chip in with that. I had it in my head that you had posted that before, but wasn't 100%.
So, as a link condom it's just preventing PR spillage from the main site?
These aren't links out to an unknown. It's just a domain that will soon be dead. I'm questioning whether NoFollow is needed at all in this case.
Quote from: IrishWonder on October 03, 2013, 12:44:42 PM
For the record, nofollow does not prevent indexing
Didn't you mean "canonical" ;-) (for those who think I'm confused, I'm thinking of IW's thread about getting query string searches indexed in spite of a "canonical" tag that should have excluded them)
Anyway, Bill, it sounds like you need noindex on the sites in question, which rules out Google CSE.
>Didn't you mean "canonical"
Both nofollow and canonical
>link condom
Yes, basically that's all nofollow is good for
funny because I thought that and went to double check before posting bollocks, and it appears Google have updated their nofollow guidance to say it does prevent indexing of the content of the page in question from a spider following it, but that the url may still be listed in the index.
Happy to accept that's lies. Even if it were the case it would still be the least reliable method of noindexing known to man, I would think!
Well technically, they won't show the description for a page disallowed from indexing by robots.txt/only linked to with nofollow links (I still think this is mainly applicable to disallowed from indexing urls, I've yet to see a description in the SERPs saying anything about nofollow links to it) - but what good is that if the URL is in the index anyway?