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seonofollownoindex

Using noindex and nofollow to avoid duplicate content penalization

Scenario:

I own a website with original content. But to support some categories I use creative commons licensed contents, which is, of course, duplicate content.

Question:

If I want to avoid penalization for duplicate content, are this statements true?

  • I should mention the original author to be a fair human being.
  • I must use meta noindex to avoid robots from fetching the content.
  • I must use cannonical url to metion the original content and it's author.
  • I don't need to use nofollow meta along with noindex, because it has other purposes.
  • I don't have to use rel="nofollow" on incoming links inside my site that point to the duplicate content, because it won't be indexed anyways, given the noindex meta tag.

I did my research and that is what I got from it. But I am not sure about this, and I would like to understand it before applying anything at all.

Thank you.

Solution

  • In order to avoid the penalization for duplicate content, you can of course use meta noindex and rel="nofollow". Here is the syntax:

    <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

    This tells robots not to index the content of a page, and/or not scan it for links to follow.
    There are two important considerations when using the robots <META> tag:

    1. Robots can ignore your <META> tag. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.

    2. The NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page. It's entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a NOFOLLOW (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page. Don't confuse this NOFOLLOW with the rel="nofollow" link attribute.