Should nofollow links be in sitemap?

Hi,

I have a question i have never seen anywhere online or talked about. If you use nofollow linking on your webpages should you not include them in your sitemap? If you don't include them in your sitemap will this not pass page rank?

I have seen companies that use nofollow but then again they have the links in their sitemap.

If they aren't nofollowed in the sitemap then they will show up in the index. ALL instances must be nofollowed, that INCLUDES other web sites linking to you (assuming the point is to prevent a page from showing up in the index.)

Hi djstreet,

Can you explain what code you can use in the xml sitemap to have the page nofollow, i mean how to add it to the example code below e.g

<url>
<loc>http://www.mydomain.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-10-29T00:03:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.00</priority>
</url>

I do not want the page to be indexed by search engines as i have a rel=nofollow on the links. But if i exclude them on the sitemap .... i'm thinking that the search engines won't know how many pages i have in total and therefore would not pass page rank. I am probably wrong in thinking that they won't know how many pages i have in total. Should i or should i not include the rel=nofollow in the sitemap.xml file for this reason?

I know you can use the robots.txt file but i need to know about the sitemap. To include or exclude the pages in sitemap.xml

If you are using xml site map than I don't think you need to use any nofollow tag for google. xml site map is specially for google indexing.

your wrong.... xml sitemap is not just for google. It can be used on Bing as well.

yes true but I don't think no follow matters for bing as well.

I'm not sure about that.....maybe your right. Will be testing it soon. Do you know if i exclude my pages from the sitemap and hope to pass page rank....will the search engines (either google or bing) know how many pages i have so they will pass page rank.

This is an area i'm stuck with.

You do'nt want to pass page rank to the nofollowed page, that's the point. You can't nofollow within the xml file itself. The solution is to remove it c completely.

you should include in sitemap.html, i think it's won't be crawl if you set nofollw in htaccess even you include in sitemap.xml

If you do not want a page indexed use "noindex, follow" meta tag on that page. This will not index the page but pass the juice through to other pages.

If you want it indexed but do not want a link from your homepage to pass juice nofollow that link and you can put it in an xml sitemap.

You can also get a html sitemap for your users. This you can put a nofollow on and it will not pass juice, it will however let the user find all your pages

If you want to index your page on the Google and don't want to pass juice of page rank than include URL on the sitemap and give no follow link from all the other pages.
Or
If you want to disallow the page from indexing than you must include it in robot.txt.

SEO Manchester | uk seo expert | web promotion uk

Thank you for your help guys......2 questions. If i use the noindex, nofollow should i not put it in the robots.txt file?? or can i do that too (maybe never for index,nofollow or noindex, follow). and should i never use <meta name="robots" content="all"> if i am using one of the above

I think i understand it. using the robots.txt file will ban them altogether and will not pass page rank. using
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> will pass page rank.

But what i'm stuck on is that i also use nofollow in the links on my pages. Does this mean that they will not be looked at by search engines therefore they will not be passing page rank?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> means that the page it is on will not get indexed by the robots. The follow means that the links on the page will be followed.

If you have links on a webpage with the rel="nofollow" tag on it then these will not pass page rank. If you have links on the noindex page with the rel="nofollow" these too would not get any page rank.