Optimize your Knowledge Base for better visibility by allowing search engine crawling and indexing

Optimize your Knowledge Base for better visibility by allowing search engine crawling and indexing

All you need to know about no-follow and no-index in KB.


What are article crawlability and indexability?  

Crawlability and indexability are vital for making an article visible and accessible to search engines. When a search engine crawls an article, it reviews the site's content to assess its topic and relevance to specific search queries. If a site lacks crawlability, meaning search engines struggle to scan it effectively, the content will not be indexed and will consequently not appear in search results.
 
Additionally, a site’s content must be appropriately optimized for search engine crawlers, allowing it to be indexed accurately and appear in relevant search outcomes. Ensuring every article is crawlable and indexable can significantly enhance its visibility and improve its search engine rankings.

How do you block search indexing?

There are two methods to apply the no-index directive: using a <meta> tag or via an HTTP response header. Both methods achieve the same result, so select the one that suits your website and content type best. Additionally, you can pair the no-index directive with other indexing rules. For instance, you can combine a no-follow directive with an index like this: <meta name="robots" content=" index, nofollow" />.
Quote<meta> tag 

To prevent all search engines that support the no-index rule from indexing a page on your site, place the following <meta> tag into the<head> section of your page:

Quote<meta name="robots" content="noindex"> 
Notes
Certain search engines may interpret the no-index directive in various ways. Therefore, your page could still appear in other search engines' results.

Usage of the no-index tag 

The no-index rule can be implemented using a <meta> tag or an HTTP response header to restrict search engines that recognize the no-index directive, like Google, from indexing certain content. When Googlebot comes across a page with this tag or header, it will remove that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether there are links from other websites.

Notes
To ensure the index rule works, the page or resource must be accessible and not blocked by a robots.txt file. If blocked, the crawler won't see the index rule, though the page might still show in search results if linked from other pages. An index is beneficial if you lack root server access, as it lets you manage page access individually.

What are no-follow links? 

Typically, it's best to allow robots to follow all links on a webpage. Being overly strict in indicating which links should be followed or marked as no-follow may give the impression that the site is trying to influence how a robot views it.

 

Page sculpting is the practice of using no-follow commands to influence the transfer of signals between pages. In the best-case scenario, these strategies to manipulate bots are ineffective. In the worst-case scenario, trying to control bots with nofollow may result in penalties.

When should you use meta no-follow?

 Consequently, there are limited scenarios in which using meta robots no-follow on websites is appropriate. Typically, encountering meta robots no-follow during SEO audits may indicate that a website has been over-optimized.

What are dofollow links?

 Dofollow links, often called "follow" links, are typical online hyperlinks. Unlike links with specific attributes such as “nofollow” or “sponsored,” these links do not carry unique identifiers. As a result, the following links contribute to the ranking control of the pages they connect to.

Experimenting with crawlability and indexability

Before a website's pages can be displayed in search results, search engine bots must first discover all the pages on the site and then analyze them to determine their rankings. The initial phase of finding pages is called crawling, while the subsequent analysis is called indexing.

 

Crawling starts with bots identifying all the URLs of a website's pages. They primarily find these URLs through internal links within the site or through backlinks from external sites. Once a bot identifies a page’s URL, it retrieves content, including the title, text, images, and additional data, such as the date it was last updated. Restrictions can dictate which files and pages a bot can crawl.

 

Indexing occurs after the crawling process. During this stage, bots assess all the information collected from the crawl. They evaluate whether the content is valuable and authoritative and identify the topics associated with the page and how it compares to other relevant pages. Additionally, search engine bots will determine which search results a page might appear in, if any, and its position within those results.

No-follow vs no-index

Let me give you a typical example of an ad campaign landing page designed solely for traffic from typical ads. It's not ideal to prevent organic search traffic from reaching these pages. Implementing meta robots and a no-index tag will keep search engines from ranking them. 

Summing up

  • No-index tells a robot not to index the page. It should be used to keep pages out of search results or to help with low-quality content issues.
  • Meta nofollow tells a robot not to follow a specific link or all of the links on a page. This should typically not be used.
  • Robots should be allowed to determine what gets indexed and shown in search results. If a page is not intended to be visible in search results, it often shouldn't be part of the website.

 

Please watch this space for more detailed use cases of SEO tags that you can apply to your organisation's knowledge base.

 

Cheers,

 

Kavya Rao,

The Zoho Desk Team


    • Sticky Posts

    • Register for Zoho Desk Beta Community

      With the start of the year, we have decided to take a small step in making the life of our customers a little easier. We now have easy access to all our upcoming features and a faster way to request for beta access. We open betas for some of our features

    • Share your Zoho Desk story with us!

      Tell us how you use Zoho Desk for your business and inspire others with your story. Be it a simple workflow rule that helps you navigate complex processes or a macro that saves your team a lot of time; share it here and help the community learn and grow with shared knowledge. 

    • Tip #1: Learn to pick the right channels

      Mail, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms—there are so many support channels out there. Trying to pick the right channels to offer your customers can get pretty confusing. Emails are most useful when the customer wants to put things on record. However, escalated or complicated issues should not be resolved over email because it's slow and impersonal.  When you need immediate responses, live chat is more suitable. It's also quick and convenient, so it's the go-to channel for small issues. 

    • Welcome to Zoho Desk Community - Say hello here!

      Hello everyone! Though we have been here for a while, it’s time to formally establish the Zoho Desk Community; we’re really happy to have you all here! This can be the place where you take a moment to introduce yourself to the rest of the community. We’d love to hear all about you, what you do, what company or industry you work for, how you use Zoho Desk and anything else that you will like to share! Here’s a little about me. I am Chinmayee. I have been associated with Zoho since 2014. I joined here

    • Webinar 1: Blueprint for Customer Service

      With the launch of a host of new features in Zoho Desk, we thought it’ll be great to have a few webinars to help our customers make the most of them. We’re starting off with our most talked about feature, Blueprint in Zoho Desk. You can register for the Blueprint webinar here: The webinar will be delivered by our in-house product experts. This is a good opportunity to ask questions to our experts and understand how Blueprint can help you automate your service processes. We look forward to seeing

    • Recent Topics

    • www.abc.com is working but abc.com is not

      I have my domain in godaddy. I have created a website using zoho sites and now I want to publish it and I tried doing it. Mapped the domain www.abc.com, abc.com. In godaddy changed the CNAME values. A, @ was parked and updated with zoho's IP address.

    • Split my account

      Hello, I recently bought an email service for a friend. But, looks like I used my personal account to buy the plan. Please split the account so that the email service stays in a different account than my personal account.

    • Have Mail Lite, wish to add/purchase 2nd domain and use email

      Hello, I have recently created two new businesses. I have successfully used Zoho to create a domain for one business and have set up two email addresses / users on that domain. I am trying to figure out how to create a second domain, just like I did the

    • Need support in setting up the company email and few other setups

      Need support in setting up the company email and few other setups

    • This mobile number has been marked spam.

      Dear zoho team, I am very happy to use zoho,because it india 🇮🇳 own app, but when we login into zoho account we facing some issue, please solve below issue ASAP. Add your mobile number As an added security measure for Accounts, you need to verify and

    • Add an external email to the allowed list

      I need to allow an external email to raise a ticket on Manage Engine ServiceDesk Plus. The external email is a outside of our domain and is not a domain user. The email address that needs to be allowed to raise a ticket request is noreply@formsatack.com.

    • Display name & account type change

      I made a mistake and subscribed with an individual account instead of business, how can I change the account type and enter the details of the business. The other question, if I can't, then I want the display name of our email to be 'Business name' instead

    • Request to change display name in Zoho mail

      Hello Zoho Mail Support, I am experiencing an issue with changing the display name on my Zoho Mail account. My email address is: info@witchcraftproduction.rs . I have already updated the display name in Settings > Mail Accounts, where it now shows as

    • Outbound IP address SPAM problem.

      Hello Zoho Support, We noticed that one of your outbound IP addresses (136.143.188.12), which delivers our domain’s mail, is currently listed on the UCEProtect blacklist. Because of this, our messages are sometimes flagged as spam by recipient servers.

    • Answer Bot and Personalized Questions

      Hi there, I have the same problem using the SalesIQ Answer Bot and the Zoho Desk Answer Bot (which really need different names, to be honest, in order to avoid confusion...) Customers that visit our website ask questions in the form of "What do you do?"

    • Forwarding

      How can I forward my Zoho account to my gmail account? Noël

    • Add a Way to Duplicate Cards in the Same Canvas (Retain All Settings)

      Dear Zoho SalesIQ Team, We would like to request a new feature in Zoho SalesIQ: the ability to duplicate an existing card within the same canvas while retaining all of its information and settings, including conditions, configurations, and display preferences.

    • Zoho Mail CC and BCC not working

      Zoho Mail CC and BCC not working. I have tried multiple combinations amongst my domain aliases but emails sent as CC or BCC never arrive, not even to Spam. I have checked that the DNS is set up correctly in Cloudflare and have even received a DMARC report

    • Zoho Autoplay Issue

      Currently, we run our graphics on a playlist with youtube videos interspersed in our office -- however, when we go to update the playlist (since last Thursday at around 8-9am EST) it no longer saves the autoplay function.  We have tried making a new account, manually saving with cntrl+s, making a new show, etc but nothing seems to work.  Even with our old program, we can't change it off of autoplay for ones that were created in the past. Another issue is that if we change a slide transition to anything

    • Critical Issue: Tickets Opened for Zoho Support via the Zoho Help Portal Were Not Processed

      Hi everyone, We want to bring to your attention a serious issue we’ve experienced with the Zoho support Help Portal. For more than a week, tickets submitted directly via the Help Portal were not being handled at all. At the same time no alert was posted

    • Adding hyperlinks in CRM emails time automatically

      It may just be me, but when I am writing an email to a lead, I find inserting a hyperlink very time consuming. Granted, I can use templates but there are a ton of scenarios where I might want to put a link in to an website that wouldnt require me to go though the effort of creating a template.  Ideally, the crm would identify that I that a string of text is a URL and insert the hyperlink automatically, just like microsoft outlook or gmail. Has anyone else had this same experience and found a way

    • Enhance "Applications Usage" with Date Filters, Historical Analytics & App-Level Breakdown

      Hello Zoho Creator Team, We are writing to request a critical enhancement to the Applications Usage section to improve our ability to monitor, analyze, and manage our platform consumption over time. While the current view of today’s usage is helpful for

    • External File Share - Allow delete

      Hi Team, when I share an external link and give it edit rights the external user can add but not delete files and folders. what am i doing wrong?

    • How to notify all members on any updates to zoho crm?

      Hi, I am using the free version of zoho CRM and currently seeing this will work for our company. We are a small company and wanted to be more informed about all the changes in zoho. 1. How do I s et notifications that go to the team for any and all changes

    • How to change the format for phone numbers?

      Mobile phone numbers are currently formatted (###) ###-####.  How can I change this to a more appropriate forms for Australia being either #### ### ### or (#)### ### ###?

    • Unattended Access on Android without Play Store

      I'm testing Zoho Assist for remote config and maintenance of our IoT devices. The devices are running Android 8.1 and do NOT have Google Play Store installed, nor can it be installed. I've been able to install Zoho Assist on the devices and load the enrollment

    • Open Sans Font in Zoho Books is not Open Sans.

      Font choice in customising PDF Templates is very limited, we cannot upload custom fonts, and to make things worse, the font names are not accurate. I selected Open Sans, and thought the system was bugging, but no, Open Sans is not Open Sans. The real

    • Is it possible to embed Zoho Bookmarks in the Cliq sidebar?

      Is there any way that each Zoho user can access their bookmarks (that live in https://bookmarks.zoho.eu/ which is technically a part of Zoho Mail) directly within Cliq? As a widget, or an item in the sidebar? My team does not use Mail, it uses Cliq all

    • Show Attachments in the customer portal

      Hi, is it possible to show the Attachments list in the portal for the particular module? Bests.

    • Kaizen #142: How to Navigate to Another Page in Zoho CRM using Client Script

      Hello everyone! Welcome back to another exciting Kaizen post. In this post, let us see how you can you navigate to different Pages using Client Script. In this Kaizen post, Need to Navigate to different Pages Client Script ZDKs related to navigation A.

    • Navigate with Ease: Announcing Improvements to Your Zoho CRM for Everyone's Setup Experience

      Hello Everyone, We’re thrilled to announce new enhancements to the Setup Menu in our Zoho CRM for Everyone system, designed to simplify your workday and streamline your overall experience. What's New? Addition of a Setup Homepage Faster Search in Setup

    • Zoho Projects Webhook fails with HTTP Error 0

      Hello Zoho Community, I am pulling my hair out over this one. I have setup a very basic http(s) server that always responds "ok" and code 200 to incoming GET requests. It will accept any parameters, and any path. Really, all it does is say "ok," and log

    • ZOHO Campaignで表のカラムの幅を調整したい。

      表を作成した際、個々のカラムの幅を調整したいのですが、方法が分かりません。 どなたかご存じの方ご教示ください。

    • Auto-upload Creator Files to WorkDrive

      Hi everyone, I’m working on a workflow that uploads files from Zoho Creator to specific subfolders in Zoho WorkDrive, as illustrated in the attached diagram. My Creator application form has two multi-file upload fields, and I want—on successful form submission—to

    • Exciting Updates to the Kiosk Studio Feature in Zoho CRM!

      Hello Everyone, We are here again with a series of new enhancements to Kiosk Studio, designed to elevate your experience and bring even greater efficiency to your business processes. These updates build upon our ongoing commitment to making Kiosk a powerful

    • Kaizen #129 : Client Script Support for Blueprints

      Hello everyone! Welcome to another week of Kaizen. Today, let us discuss about how you can use Client Script during a Blueprint transtion to meet your requirements. This Kaizen post will provide solution for the post - Need non-mandatory fields in blueprint

    • Search Bar Improvement for Zoho Commerce

      Hey everyone, I've been using Zoho Commerce for a bit now, and I think the search bar could really use an upgrade. Right now, it doesn't show products in a dropdown as you type, which would make finding items a lot faster. On Shopify, for example, you

    • Making digital signatures accessible to all: Introducing accessibility controls in Zoho Sign

      Hi there! At Zoho Sign, we are committed to building an inclusive digital experience for all our users. As part of our ongoing efforts to align with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), we’re updating the application with support that will go

    • Account Owner Field From Accounts Module to be Displayed in Contacts module

      I have a field in the Accounts Module in the CRM called "Account Owner" i want that field to be also mapped into the Contacts Module custom single line field called "Account Manager".

    • Update a field in the ZOHO Form, basis numeric value in another field in the same form

      I am trying to create a questionnaire in ZOHO, where clients need to answer 10 questions, and basis response, values are assigned. I have created a total score field where the sum of the values is stored. But i am unable to create a rule whereby another

    • How to update "Lead Status" to more than 100 records

      Hello Zoho CRM, How do I update "Lead Status" to more than 100 records at once? To give you a background, these leads were uploaded or Imported at once but the lead status record was incorrectly chosen. So since there was a way to quickly add records in the system no matter how many they are, we are also wondering if there is a quicker way to update these records to the correct "Lead Status". I hope our concern makes sense and that there will be a fix for it. All the best, Jonathan

    • Meet up de Zoho en Bilbao

      Buenos días comunidad! Estamos estudiando hacer un Meet up en Bilbao desde zoho y varios Partners. Para que la experiencia sea excelente, queremos saber cuantas pesonas se vendrían a Bilbao al evento. Y para que sea lo mas útil posible, que temas dentro

    • Picklist reference value in REST

      picklist options can be configured to have a different reference value than the displayed one, should be helpful in things like multilanguage: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/crm/customize-crm-account/translations/articles/translations is there a way

    • In Zoho inventory Converting sales return to cerdit note from using Api from Creator Error details: {"code":-1,"message":"Invalid Sales Return ID."}

      In Zoho inventory Converting sales return to cerdit note from using Api from Creator Error details: {"code":-1,"message":"Invalid Sales Return ID."} this is button Function used in the Creator map Inventory.Create_Credit_note(int CRE_ID) { return_value

    • Marketing Tip #2: Recover lost sales with abandoned cart emails

      Did you know most online shoppers don’t complete checkout? Automated cart recovery emails are an easy way to bring them back. A simple reminder can recover sales you’d otherwise lose. Try this today: Enable abandoned cart emails in Zoho Commerce and set

    • Next Page