Pages i dont want customers to see

[iivgi]

Hi,

I have a website and part of it is the admin page/s that my customers can log in and modify their pages( change pictures, change text, etc...)

When i run SEO tools to check my site i get errors or warnings about these pages ( duplicate content, meta description missing, etc...)

1. Is this affects my SEO rank?

2. can i mark them as pages that don't need to be ranked or checked by Google?

3. Is Rel no follow is part of the solution?

Thank you

i.

[BeardoCo]

Depending on what platform you are using you are going to want to make these pages as no index in your robots file.  Alternatively WordPress and other promising CMS allow you to mark a page not be indexed. using a plugin.

[iivgi]

Thank you for the quick response

Are these error /  warnings affects my SEO rank?

i.

[ollan]

Hi iivgi,

If it's marked as duplicate content, it can definitely affect your SEO rank. You can add a directive in robots.txt to disallow crawling of those pages. The problem with that though, is that the page can still be indexed if there is an external link to it. The way to prevent that is to use:

in the section of those pages you don't want indexed. The pages may still get crawled, but the pages shouldn't show up in the SERPs.

[Branagan]

Yes, they could affect your rankings, probably more so if you're getting errors and warnings from them, and even if you don't want to index them, depending on which kind of errors you're getting, it'd be probably a good idea to fix them up, as they will still be part of your site.

Now, if you use robots.txt those pages could get indexed anyway (i.e. someone else links to them), and could also stall ranking factors, read more here.

About the links, you'd probably be better off using 'noindex' instead of 'nofollow', to make sure pages aren't indexed and don't drain your juice, but I guess in this case the best choice would be to use a 'noindex, follow' meta tag within those pages, to make sure they aren't indexed and don't drain your site.

Although, if the content is sensitive (as you say, customer data) it'd be better to password protect it, that way you'd be blocking not only search engine bots but malicious robots, spyware, and uninvited users as well.

[iivgi]

Thank you all for you answers!!!