No index, no follow set for our domain?

[Anonymous]

Hello! Our SEO/PPC company is asking that we set a 'noindex, nofollow' for the entire Marketo domain where our landing pages reside. Is that possible? Or do we need to add that to each landing page?

Thanks in advance!!

[Frank_Breen2]

You'll need to contact Marketo Support to do this and it's done via the robots.txt file.

If you go down the route of the noindex, nofollow route this will only block landing pages, not files.

[Josh_Hill13]

You could also set this in every Template, I think.

Why would your SEO firm want you to do this?

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh- They said they are worried about Google Analytics reporting being skewed. They are actually focusing on PPC in this instance and want to accurately report PPC traffic. We are still getting a handle on all of this and I wanted to see what others thought as it sounded strange to me as well...

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Meghan,

This is a weird request, at least.

Your Marketo landing pages will likely be collecting inbound links from various social network, industry blogs, etc... These links will be created by your visitors, who likely will not care much about your SEO agency directives

In this conditions, it would be a strange message to tell to search engines not to index these pages.

Furthermore, the total number of pages with significant content (>250 words) is also a positive factor for SE's, so why removing your landing pages ? and if they have less than 250 words, the SEO result of these pages will be low anyway.

I personally would expect my SEO agency to help me to increase SEO results of your Marketo LP's, especially these that will be on line for a long time (white papers and other content).

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

Seconding the others' skepticism, but also you don't need Support to do this as you can add your own Redirect Rule. Someone asked this very recently.

[Frank_Breen2]

Totally agree with the above comments, my suggestion of robots.txt will allow you to block everything in the sub domain easily and in one go, you can do it page by page of course in the Meta Section.

robots.txt is a great feature we all should be using.

Type this into Google

site:pages2.marketo.com filetype:pdf

You'll see all PDF resources in Marketo are totally open, I'd maybe guess this is why your SEO/PPC company is suggesting this. It's a nice hack to get around Marketo forms and access gated content hosted there. Food for thought.

[Anonymous]

Thanks everyone! I am going to discuss this with them further. I believe they are trying to clean up PPC reporting rather than SEO. I'll fill you in should I get more details.

[JeffHensiek]

Is there a way to set a noindex/nofollow on just the outbound links? 

We have several links that point to white labeled tools used by our brand and we'd like to not index those white labeled/3rd party landing pages (e.g. secure login for our users, formal applications, etc.).  We're going to be putting a noindex on the 3rd party landing pages... and, as an added level of precaution, we were thinking it would be good to also apply the nofollow attribute to the links as well.

Thoughts?

[SanfordWhiteman]

This thread is very old, so better to start a new one — but you certainly can add rel=“nofollow” to any links. Not automatically, though.