Craiglist Adds NoFollow Meta Tag To Pages

Mar 3, 2009 - 7:58 am 2 by

It appears Craigslist, the very popular and old school directory listing site, has added the nofollow meta tag to most of their pages. If you view the source of the listing pages, you should see <meta name="robots" content="NOARCHIVE,NOFOLLOW"> in the header of the pages.

This tag was designed to tell a search engine not to follow any of the links on the page, including all the internal links. This is part of the reason the nofollow link attribute was designed, to give webmasters more control on which links should be followed by search engines and which ones should not be followed.

I find it interesting that Craigslist decided to simply nofollow all the links on the page, using the nofollow meta tag, as opposed to slapping on the nofollow attribute on user generated links.

As Google's help document explains, "originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page." But since the creation of the nofollow attribute value of the rel attribute, most sites have abandoned using the meta tag for the more controlled attribute.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: September 19, 2024

Sep 19, 2024 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility Continue With Big Movement Again 9/18

Sep 19, 2024 - 7:51 am
Google Maps

Google Suspending Many Google Business Profiles

Sep 19, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google: Core Web Vitals Aren't As Important As Some People Might Think

Sep 19, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Product Results Top Insights With YouTube Videos

Sep 19, 2024 - 7:21 am
Google

Study: 96% Of Google AI Overviews Links Go To Informational Intent Pages

Sep 19, 2024 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Daily Search Forum Recap: March 2, 2009