To noindex and follow or noindex no follow?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

We have to greatly scale back on one of our services and focus on the other more successful ones. I need to figure out what to do with all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back.

Just to be clear, we aren't getting rid of the service. So they still want the pages on the website, but it is better for us to have more link juice going to the other service pages, more of our content ratio to be around the more profitable services, etc.

So, should I no-index/no-follow all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back on? Or should I no-index/follow all the pages relating the service we are cutting back on?

Thanks,

Ruben

[ATShock]

I would think no-index/no-follow would make the most sense in this case.

[EGOL]

If I have a limited supply of an item, I raise prices so that I make a maximum amount from the stock on hand.   I do the same if I am selling a service that is billed by the hour or by the job and I need to limit its availability.  I allow the customer to decide if they want what I have at the price I want to receive.

If I have other products that are close to what I am short on, I will remove the short supply product from the category page competition.  That will allow people on my site to see comparable products, but anyone who is searching for that product by name might still find my item in search.   For that reason, I would allow one or two links to those pages on the site, but not give that item a "noindex".

The above are pricing plays.

For SEO plays, limiting the number of links that enter the pages that are in limited supply will allow pagerank that originally went into them to flow to other pages.   This was very effective ten years ago when pagerank flow was important.  Today there are a lot of other items in the algo and on-site connectivity to a page is not as important.  However, cutting down the internal links into a page still might be slightly valuable.

[Gyorgy.B]

+1 for EGOL

I would play with the pricing strategy instead of using noindex and nofollow on my site. These unwanted service pages might have valuable Page Authority and pass link juice in internal navigation, so noindex and nofollow can potentially hurt the overall organic search performance of your site.

If you don't want Google to crawl these pages looking for new information, simply block crawling in robots.txt but leave them in Google's index.