: Why would you ever use NOINDEX without NOFOLLOW Everytime I've used the NOINDEX directive on a page, it made sense to use NOFOLLOW as well. I can't imagine a scenario where you would not want

@Sue5673885

We are using the Atomz site search service on our site. Atomz has a 10000 page limit, and our site has more. So we added "no index" to all pages that are not main content pages (mostly table of contents pages, of which there are many, for good reasons). However, we obviously want the links on these pages to be followed, so we added "follow". With this setup, all the important pages are crawled and indexed by Atomz and can thus be found by users. Of course, this also impacts other robots, like Google, but not indexing these table of contents pages seems to be a good thing for all searches.

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@Cofer257

Yoast answers this very well in this blog post:


A better solution would be to add a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> tag to those search results pages, as it would prevent the search results from rankings but would allow the link “juice” to flow through to the returned posts and pages.


Someone will inevitably link to a page you wish Google to not index. However, if you nofollow the links you are losing the benefit of that link. That page likely has links to your home page and other pages on the site which aren't noindex.

In certain cases you may have some pages you do want indexed but are only linked from noindex pages. (Although I would argue that in this case the site structure probably needs improvement.)

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@Ann8826881

If you choose to noindex your privacy policy, legal and login pages then I don't necessarily see any reason to use nofollow on these pages as well.

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@Kaufman445

Perhaps a very non-user friendly site-map?

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