Making Wise Use of The Nofollow Tag To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

If there is anything that I can’t stand, it is searching for some keyword in Google and finding tons of non-relevant results.

This happens all of the time, but its not Google’s fault. I know we like to blame them for everything, but in this particular case, we simply can’t point at them, because as webmasters, this is something we actually have control over.

What am I referring to? The indexing of dynamic web pages.

Nofollow Those Dynamic Web Pages

Now it goes without saying…all blogs and article directories have seemed an endless supply of dynamic web pages.

By dynamic, of course, I mean the content on them is always changing.

Article directories and blogs are of particular interest here because they are the main culprits for this highly irritating phenomenon…and I too was at fault.

In short, a dynamic web page on any given blog or article directory is one in which the content is updated and the newest is placed at the top and as new content is added, the older content scrolls down the page and eventually gets placed on the following page.

By that definition, any page that is considered an archive page, a category page, a tag page, a search page, or anything remotely similar to these should be nofollow tagged.

Why Would Anybody Want To Deindex Their Own Web Pages?

Why? Simple. Because when somebody searches for a keyword in Google and they see their keyword in bold in a search result on your website…all the while not realizing that it was indexed on a dynamic page…only to “not find the information they were looking for” when they click on that link, they immediately bounce…thus increasing your increasingly important “bounce rate”.

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Now, many will tell you that the bounce rate of your website is not important. Well, I’m here to tell you that it is.

A high bounce rate tells a search engine…such as the big “G”…that your site is not relevant for that search term…or any search term for that matter..and that’s bad, really bad for your site.

But we’re not gonna let that happen.

If you haven’t already, you need to “follow” your archives, categories, tags, and search pages.

How Can I Do This?

Of course, if you do this, Google will de-index them, BUT, if you do this, Google’s clientele will not bounce from pages they serve to them and Google really, really likes that.

If you are running a blog or article directory using WordPress, the All-in-One-SEO plugin provides this function automatically…you simply have to elect it.

In doing so, you will (in time) reduce your bounce rate and increase your relevancy in search results.

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