Do You Want Your Ancillary Pages in Googles Index

By Michael Gray
In SEO  

Since I did a less than stellar job explaning what I meant by keeping your ancillary pages out of Googles index when I reviewed Mahalo last week, I thought I’d try and correct that error.

First off lets define what I’m talking about when I say ancillary pages:

contact us
about us
terms of service
privacy policy
locations

The list isn’t all encompassing, but I think you get the idea of what I’m talking about, basically the “non money pages”. The question is do you want those pages in Google’s index and the answer is … it depends.

You have to ask yourself this question, is there information on any of those pages that I want someone to be able to search for in a search engine? I really can’t think of too many good reasons you’d want your terms of service or privacy policy in any of the search engines. Do you want your contact us page in the search engine, if it’s just an email form probably not. However if you have a physical address, or phone number on the page you certainly would. If you do have a physical address and phone and want it in the index, I’d make the argument that it should be on all of your pages, not just your contact page, but I digress. Is there anything on your about us page you think someone might search for then yes. If it’s just a bunch a fluff, filler and blah blah copy then no. Location is a bit trickier, if you have one location you don’t really need a dedicated location page. If you have few locations, then yes you’ll want the page indexed. If you have so many locations you need a DB/zip code inquiry or a large map then you don’t want the page in the index. You should however really strive to get a machine readable listing of all your locations it will improve your local search results tremendously.

Hopefully now that you’ve got a better idea of what pages you do and don’t want in the index, so lets talk about implementation. The complicated thing here is each engine handles things a bit differently, so you’ve got to do things like you’re from the department of the redundancy department. First off lets talk about common navigation, these pages will probably be on every page in the header footer, and or sidebar. I’d put a nofollow tag there. Because no follow only works from internal pages and doesn’t prevent what people do from the outside do you should also use the noindex meta tag. To complete the circle you should make sure should also exclude the pages in the robots.txt file. Anytime you play with your robots.txt file you need to be careful it’s really easy to make a mistake and send things into a tailspin. So double and triple check your work or better yet use Google Webmaster Central to make sure you didn’t screw something up.

Ok since there’s a bit of brain power involved, and there’s the potential to really screw things up, is it worth even monkeying with? Absolutely. As I mentioned above each of these pages is almost certainly going to be linked to from the header.footer/sidebar of most if not all of your pages. That kind of interlinkage is going to create powerful internal page with lots of page rank. Since every site has a limited amount of page rank you have to decide is worth “squandering” some of that page rank on “non money pages” that people are never going to be searching for? For me that’s a pretty easy answer, I like the ability to be able to sculpt to some extant the flow of page rank within my website.

So now you’re thinking hmm clearly this falls firmly into the “hey I actually have to do some work category” and you’re wondering why not just skip the whole thing and pull the pages from your site entirely. That would be a mistake as well. If you look at the January 2006 Google Librarian newsletter you’ll see Google recommends librarians look for things like an about us or credentials page to help them determine if a website is credible or not. I haven’t seen any evidence to prove or disprove that Google is looking for about us or privacy policy pages in an automated way and factoring it into the algorithm. However the thing to keep in mind is these ancillary pages are made for people, and since Google claims they have over 5,000 spam raters who know how to file spam reports, having those ancillary pages is a pretty easy way to look more authentic.

There you have it, hopefully I cleared things up so you can understand it a bit better. Things like this are small little changes that help you focus your website just a little bit more. By itself something like this may not do much, but combined with other things the effect becomes cumulative and can make a world of difference.

Related posts:

1. Google Loves Wikipedia – Even the Empty Pages If you
2. How To Figure Out What Parts of Your Website Aren’t Being Crawled When Googl
3. Are You in Violation of Google’s Double Serving Policy? You Just Might Be! The follow