2 ways to prevent Google to crawl links in Forums or Websites

2 ways to prevent Google to crawl links in Forums or Websites.

If you are a webmaster or blogger, then you might know that Google crawls the links to include it in its index. Not every link is crawled, which depends whether the webpage HTML codes has allowed the search engine bots to crawl or not. But sometimes, webmasters of some company related websites get stuck up with some problems in the website management and need help to figure out what their problem is? So in quest for the answer to their problems, they search thoroughly in the internet. But what happens when they do not find any solution to their answers?



If the webmasters are not able to find the right solution for their problem, they post their queries in some webmasters forums like Google webmaster forum. While posting their questions in the forum, they are required to provide the link to their website, so that the techies present at the forum can take a look at the website, its content, layout, source code, etc and can figure out what the problem is and then they try to give some possible solutions.

You may or may not probably get the answer to your questions, but then after some days when you will search for your website name in Google, then you will find that the question you had posted on the webmasters forum with link to your website will appear first in the search results than your own website. This happens because the link you provided there was indexed by the search engine bots.

Though this doesn’t matters much to general webmasters or bloggers, but what happens if the website is of business value. If the customers of that website find that forum question while searching through the internet, then it may create some misconceptions about the website expertise.

But as I believe, that every problem has solutions, so as mentioned in the title of this post, here i will tell about 2 ways to prevent Google from indexing your links.

Method-1


This option can be used if you have access to the HTML codes of the webpages, generally if you are providing some links in your own webpages and you are not sure, the website is good or not, then you can use this ways. Well i assume that you know the fact that linking to bad or penalised websites, may also devalue your own website image in front of Google and other search engines. You can use this method by providing “nofollow” attribute in the link.

Suppose you provide link to www.30840320384.com

Then the HTML source code for this link will be shown as

<a href=”http://www.30840320384.com”> www.30840320384.com</a>


Just change the code as

<a href=”http://www.30840320384.com” rel=”nofollow”> www.30840320384.com</a>
This “nofollow” tag will prevent search engines from crawling the links

Method-2
Now if suppose, you are posting in some website comments or forums where you don’t have access to HTML codes, then you can do the following.

Go to the following website http://cli.gs  . Enter your URL and then shorten it.

This is an internet tool which can be used to both shorten and mask URLs. So after shortening it, the URL automatically gets masked and will prevent the search engine bots to crawl the links.

If you have any queries or any suggestions, then do comment below and let us know. Do not forget to share the article if you liked this post.

1 comment:

  1. I can't help but be amazed at Google's remarkable technology. This blog is awesome and this post is really useful for webmasters like me. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

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