: SEO: How to stop certain web-pages from "having importance" Possible Duplicate: SEO - Reducing significance of irrelevant kewords. I wrote "having importance" since I do not really

@Sue5673885

Yes you can do this by setting the priority within the sitemap.xml

see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps#Element_definitions
example

<url>
<loc>http://www.foo.com</loc>
<lastmod>2011-06-03</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority></url>
</url>


So in your case to set a low importance you could use 0.1 or 0.2 as the priority

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@Steve110

The short answer is no. There is no way to tell Google the pages aren't important without simply telling Google to ignore them completely (via, as you have suggested, NOINDEX, although you should really use the robots.txt for this).

It used to be the case that nofollow would cause any page rank that was directed to those pages to be redistributed elsewhere. Use of nofollow to achieve this was know as "Page Rank Sculpting". For a few years now, Google has changed their policy so that instead of redistributing the page rank, it simply evaporates.

Here's an example:

How things used to work - You have a page with 10 links and page rank 5. Five of the links are nofollow so the page rank gets divided between the remaining 5 links, each of the getting 1 point.

How things work now - That same page with 5 followed links and 5 nofollowed still have page rank 5. However, that score is now divided between all 10 links. The 5 followed links each get 0.5 points. Another 0.5 points simply evaporates on each of the nofollowed links.

As such, there's no way to control what pages are more "important". It's an all or nothing, include or ignore situation. As long as a page is included/indexed, Google/Bing/whoever will decide for you how important it is.

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