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Today's question comes from Andy in New York.
Andy asks, Can you give us an example of a situation where
you would recommend using a NOINDEX,
FOLLOW robots META tag?
OK, so it's a little bit arbitrary.
But imagine if you have a site map, an HTML site map, and for
whatever reason you don't want Google to actually return the
site map itself.
So maybe you have a couple hundred links on that page and
you're worried oh, Google might think that that looks a
little spammy, so I'm not going to worry about that.
But you want users to see it just fine.
In theory, you could have a noindex meta tag, so that
wouldn't be returned within the search results.
But then have follow, which allows us to follow those
outgoing links.
So if you're doing a site map, which doesn't look all that
pretty or that you don't want to be returned in the search
results, you can use the no index.
But then if you still want those links to be followed,
that's an example where you could use the noindex comma
follow or noindex space follow to make sure that Google is
still willing to process and index those
links and follow them.
So it's not a very common case, but there are some
situations in which we see people do that.