Many high value links to printer-friendly versions of our pages

[aafpitadmin]

First, forgive me if I miss something obvious. I'm a user experience designer who handles all SEO efforts for our organization in my spare time. This question is about our patient / health education website, http://familydoctor.org

NIH's Medline Plus ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ ) has linked to http://familydoctor.org for a very, very long time, before we had advertisements on the site. To get an idea of where Medline Plus links to familydoctor.org, visit http://goo.gl/1yaofC or use the following query in Google.com: site:www.nlm.nih.gov inurl:medlineplus American Academy of Family Physicians

After we redesigned and started putting ads on FD.org, I think these two things happened simultaneously, we received a contact from someone at NIH stating they could no longer link to our site because of the ads. NIH is a highly-trusted and ranked domain, so we agreed to let them link to the printer-friendly versions of our content to avoid the ads.

A few years later, we restructured the content. For an article about depression, instead of having one page with all of the content ( http://web.archive.org/web/20090215071258/http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/common/mentalhealth/depression/046.html ), we broke it up into many shorter pages ( http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/depression.html ), such as Overview, Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment, etc. I don't know if NIH crossed anyone's mind until go-live day, when we noticed a high number of referrals to the error page coming from NIH.gov. We wanted to fix this quickly, so Medline didn't stop linking to us and Google didn't de-value the relationship because of the broken links.

We redirected all of the printer-friendly links from the previous site to the printer-friendly whole article (lets you see all the information on one page) on the new site. We did this because there is no way to move between now split up content pages in the split up printer-friendly versions of the site. Even if there was, we didn't think NIH would take too kindly to this.

There is a return to the web link on the printer-friendly whole article page. This is a followed link and I realize the anchor text could be improved. We added the following on printer-friendly pages in an effort to not get penalized by search engines for duplicate content.

Are we doing all we can to take advantage of these high-value links? Is the meta robots tag necessary, helpful, or not?

[CleverPhD]

Use of the canonical link should solve all of your problems as far as how the search engines.  Bots that view the PF page will take the canonical directive and treat it like a 301 redirect and pass link equity etc.

The other thing you need to consider is the use of rel next and prev for the article that you broke into parts if you consider this one big article broken up into parts.  That would be used to "connect" all the sections of your depression article to each other.

Frankly, I do not know why you broke up this page into parts as the article is not that long as a whole  There is some data out there that longer articles get more links http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/20/the-science-behind-long-copy-how-more-content-increases-rankings-and-conversions/

One issue on the print pages is that you have a meta noindex tag. That tells Google to deindex the page and not to crawl it.  You do not need to use that tag as you are using the canonical to tell Google what the "parent" page.  If you are using the rel next prev on both the regular and paginated pages, I would advise canonicaling P1 to P1, P2 to P2 and the All to the All page vs canonical everything to the main page.

You are basically telling Google two things.

1. with rel next prev - here are the parts that make up the whole.

2. with the canonical - if they look at the PF version, here is the "real" page they want to pay attention to.  This is what passes the link equity along to the proper pages.  If you are getting links into the "print all page" this is the key page to have canonical linked to the "real" page.

What I would do is put this all into one page and then it is simple.  Just canonical the PF page to the actual page and remove the noindex meta tag off the PF page.

If the above does not make sense, read each of the articles below about 3x and watch the video 3x it should help

Here are the Google Pages on canonicals

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

and rel next prev

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Good luck!