Restricting SE bots.

[ITsoldSEO]

Hi,

on my main domain would restricting a folder (such as the helpdesk that uses whmcs which is awful from an SEO standpoint but is vital for my clients) from being indexed hinder my SERPs?

Thanks in advance.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Daren. It's hard to say without going into the details specific to the site, but in general it shouldn't hurt it. There probably aren't a lot of inbound links to the helpdesk and that area probably doesn't serve as a main landing page from the search engines either. If you NOINDEX / FOLLOW that section you'll be able to keep those pages out of the SE and still allow the on page links to be measured.

Be sure to check Analytics to verify what kind of traffic you're getting from organic visitors and run the site through OSE and GWT to see if for some reason the helpdesk is getting a high number of links. In the rare case it is, it'd probably be better to redirect those portions to a public facing FAQ, or a few other pages topically dedicated to the content that you're deciding to remove from the search engines.  Cheers!