• Graywolfs SEO Blog, Monday, October 22, 2007 1:30 PM

For sites with dozens of pages of information, much of the SEO work is about deciding which content should be made available to the search engine spiders -- and which should just "exist" for visitors to find through intra-site navigation.

According to Michael Gray, depending on the nature of a business, these ancillary pages could include sections like "about us," and the company's privacy policy or terms of service. Gray outlines a strategy for determining whether to include these pages or not (based on how relevant they'll be to a majority of user queries), and then gives details for how to use the "nofollow" and "noindex" meta-tags to keep them from being indexed.

Gray even suggests that a more thorough way to make sure the pages are not crawled is by excluding them from the site's robots.txt -- though he does caution that tweaking robots.txt file info can be disastrous if not done correctly. To counter the possibility of massive errors, Gray also advocates checking for the results of all changes with Google Webmaster Central.

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