What are article crawlability and indexability?

What are article crawlability and indexability?

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

    • Tip #41- Simplify Compliance and Efficiency with Zoho Assist’s Data Cleanup Feature- 'Insider Insights'

      Managing device data efficiently is just as important as securing remote access. With Zoho Assist’s Data Cleanup feature, admins can easily remove outdated or unnecessary device records, keeping the console organized and secure. This action is carried

    • Revenue Management: #6 Revenue Recognition in Professional Services Industry

      If you run a consulting firm, agency, or any service-based business, you have a situation where you have signed the contract, maybe even sent the invoice, and have received some initial payments. So, can you consider this as revenue? What if the project

    • Zoho fsm scheduled maintenance dispatch

      Hi, I'm reaching out regarding an issue I'm encountering with the Scheduled Maintenance feature in Zoho FSM. I’m trying to configure it so that it automatically dispatches all maintenance jobs scheduled within the next 150 days, starting from today. However,

    • Template modifiactions

      Hello, I am struggling with the templates in ZOHO Books. Especially with the placement of some items, like company address, ship to, bill to etc.  For example: One item I like from template X (placement of ship to and bill to next to each other in the

    • zoho.inventory.getRecords returns no records

      I running a custom function (Deluge) in Zoho Flow with a connection to Zoho Inventory. To debug the problem, I created the test function below. It returns "Number of contacts fetched: 0". This confirms that there's no issue with the org ID or connection

    • Zoho Campaigns Event timestamps do not propagate to Zoho CRM

      We have integrated Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns. But when looking at Contact records, the Campaign event data is missing the actual timestamps: especially when a particular email was sent. They're not in the Campaigns related list, and the cannot be found

    • Feature announcement - Simplifying document creation with Zoho Sign

      Hi there, We are pleased to announce the release of our document creation feature, enabling you to create, edit, and finalize documents like agreements, purchase orders, and contracts without relying on external tools or applications. &lt;br&gt; This

    • Integrating File Attachments in Zoho Flow Email Notifications

      Hi, I would like to be able to send an email once an entry is made in a form, and in this email, I would like to attach a file that has been added to the form using the ImageUpload (or FileUpload) widget. So, I started by creating a flow that will trigger

    • Zoho Mail SMTP IP addresses

      We are using Zoho Mail and needs to whitelist IP for some redirections from your service to another e-mails. You can provide IP address list for Zohomail SMTP servers?

    • Zoho project purchases

      Hi Folks, I think having a purchase module in projects will help in putting together a project p and L. Project wise purchases and expenses.  Do let me know your thoughts.

    • Create Tasklist with Tasklist Template using API v3

      In the old API, we could mention the parameter 'task_template_id' when creating a tasklist via API to apply a tasklist template: https://www.zoho.com/projects/help/rest-api/tasklists-api.html#create-tasklist In API v3 there does not seem to be a way to

    • How can I restore all the deleted Time entries of a Task in Zoho Projects

      How can I restore all the deleted Time entries of a Task in Zoho Projects? Query: In Zoho Projects, I cloned a task and deleted the time entries from the cloned task. However, this also deleted the time entries from the original task. How can I restore

    • Is there a way to make an account inactive in ZoHo Desk

      We have a few Clients "Accounts" that we no longer do business with. It would be beneficial for them to not show up in lists. However, we want to go back and view tickets, time, etc.

    • How to set the value of the Phone field importing contacts in Zoho Desk

      Hi everyone, i'm new in Zoho Desk, we're setting up the environment and i'm importing contacts from another CRM using a file CSV and i'm getting a problem with phone numbers (italian): the leading zero is cut away, also if the value is inside double quotes.

    • Set Custom Icon for Custom Modules in new Zoho CRM UI

    • Change total display format in weekly time logs

      Hi! Would it be possible to display the total of the value entered in the weekly time log in the same format that the user input? This could be an option in the general settings -> display daily timesheet total in XX.XX format or XX:XX.

    • Deprecation Notice: OpenAI Assistants API will be shut down on August 26, 2026

      I recieved this email from openAI what does it means for us that are using the integration and what should we do? Earlier this year, we shared our plan to deprecate the Assistants API once the Responses API reached feature parity. With the launch of Conversations,

    • How to center a field inside a section?

      I’ve been trying to center a field inside a section in Zoho Canvas. When I align it visually, it looks centered in the editor, but after clicking Save, the field appears misaligned on the actual canvas. I also tried setting the field to full width, but

    • Kaizen #192 - Implementing Custom Token Persistence in Python SDK

      Welcome back to another week of Kaizen! Last week, we discussed how to implement Login with Zoho using OAuth 2.0 and saw how to bring it to life in a real-world application with the Zoho CRM Python SDK. We also discussed how Zylker Academy built a custom

    • Showing the map along with mileage expense

      When you use the GPS to track mileage, it shows you the map of the actual path travelled. It would be very useful and practical to save that map with the mileage expense, so that when the report is created, it provides a map of each mileage expense associated

    • Enable Validation Rule for Multi-Select Picklist Field

      Zoho, Please allow validation rules for multi-select fields.

    • File Upload field not showing in workflow

      Hi, I have added a field on Zoho CRM. I want to use it in a workflow where that particular field is updated based on another field, however it is not showing up in the field list to select it in the workflow. Why is this please?

    • CRM Custom function updating a module record shows the Super Admin user as the record modifier

      Dear Zoho CRM Team, Is there any way to update this so that when a custom function has updated a record the Super Admin user doesn't become the modifier? This happens on the record as a modifier and shows up in the audit logs. It would be more useful

    • Best practice importing items and matching assemblies

      Hi, I was wondering what would be the best practice to import items and composite items (assemblies) From my backup, what should I import first? The items or the composite items? I am on Zoho one, using inventory and books. Kind regards, Sabine

    • Best way to fetch employee names from Zoho People into Zoho Creator Inventory Stock Form field Employee Name Lookup

      Hi Team, I have a requirement in my Zoho Creator application (Inventory Stock Adjustment) where I need to fetch employee names from Zoho People and use them as a lookup in a form. Currently, I am considering using an integration field to fetch this data

    • get file api is returning Junk data

      I am working on extension development where at one point I need to retrieve attachments on records I found out I can use only invokeconnection and not invokeurl in extension development The invoke connection returns the image in raw binary format. When

    • Need help with message box

      End user updates many records at once. Each have unique serial number. They want a confirmation box that says starting number, ending number and qty. Is there any way to do this? I been searching and asking support but seems like no great solution.

    • [Webinar] The Transformative Power of Gen BI

      Traditional decision-making tools are no longer enough. The integration of generative AI into business intelligence (BI) is proving to be a true game changer—enabling businesses to make faster, smarter, and better informed decisions. Early adopters of

    • Backorder process review - Automating Removal of Sales Order from "On Hold" When PO is Received

      Hello Zoho Inventory Team, Currently, sales orders in On Hold status are released only when the bill for the purchase order is created. In our workflow, it would be much more efficient if the sales order could automatically move out of On Hold as soon

    • How to access the saved Query using API?

      I have created a query in setting. Is it possible to access it from a API? What's the endpoint? I tried /v8/queries/important_deals but didnt' work.

    • création d'une base de données

      base de donnee d'un lycée

    • User Session variables to recall after form submit & redirect to menu

      Hey, Forgive me if this is a simple answer I have overlooked. I have built a big onboarding process for my SAAS platform which is built and managed by an external Dev team. I am hoping to embed my new creator app on the SAAS platform. I have a menu page

    • Zoho Writer Merge Template with data from Zoho Analytics Views

      Hello, Is there any way to pull information from Zoho Analytics and put it into a Merge Template? I am trying to create a bulk export of one report that filters on a field to create a single document for each of the filter fields.

    • Having to enter bill before stock shows as available.

      Hi, Am I right in thinking you must create a bill from the purchase order receipt before the goods are available for shipping?

    • Agent Availability report

      From data to decisions: A deep dive into ticketing system reports Businesses need to track when their support agents check in and check out from work. This report, titled Agent Availability, is one of the static reports that helps managers track the number

    • Writing by Hand in "Write" Notes

      Hi there! I just downloaded this app a few moments ago, and I was wondering if there was a way to write things by hand in "Write" mode instead of just typing in the keyboard. It would make things a bit more efficient for me in this moment. Thanks!

    • AI-driven construction analytics using Zoho Projects Plus

      Construction projects thrive on timelines; if a project is completed on or before the expected time, it makes headlines, but if it gets delayed, the company’s credibility will be at risk. Such projects require precise planning and constant monitoring,

    • Canadian payroll

      Hello ZOHO, is any updates on when payroll for Canada will be available?

    • Unified customer view: Bringing product intelligence into your CRM data

      For businesses today, applications and digital interfaces are the main touch points in the customer journey. While Zoho CRM data already tells who your customers are and what they buy, Zoho Apptics tells you how they interact and engage with your product.

    • Zoho Creator SaaS app with multiple client AND multiple users

      I am close to finalizing a Zoho Creator app that will be used by different companies to manage sale info, and each company can have multiple users using the app. Things were going perfectly until I tried a search on a report. I use a database field in each table to separate the data for each company, which works great. BUT when I do a search, I get to see ALL the data. This means that Company A could easily see the data from Companies B and C via the built-in search. Is there a way to set up the

    • Next Page