Myweddingfavors.com NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW

myweddingfavors.com has a stranglehold on google's search for 'wedding favors' and has had it for quite some time... I was going over their pages trying to learn a bit about their techniques and noticed that their home page had NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW -- what am I not getting here? I thought that giving a meta robots command of 'noindex' would prevent the SE's from indexing that particular page, and 'nofollow' should prevent them from spidering into the site. Yet of course Google loves these guys, indexes a bunch of their pages (pr and all), naturally has sitelinks and so on...

Thanks,
Jeremy

interestingly, the cached copy has a different robots meta... they could be serving a different copy of the page to googlebot/surfers (which is risky) or - i guess - there could be a more innocent explanation!

They are actually not serving a different page to the bots (ClickyB is right, that would be very risky). The reason they have the noindex is to keep proxy servers cloaking themselves as the google bot from indexing their home page and then submitting hundreds or thousands of duplicate pages to google, which resulted in getting their real home page de-indexed a couple of years ago. They are now able to verify through an ip address if it is a real google bot and they tell all others to noindex. It appears this was done by one of their competitors in an attempt to get them off the front page.

So that has nothing to do with their ranking strategy, just a defense against competitors who can't beat them naturally.

Ryan Gledhill
Element SEO