Why would you not want Google to index those pages in particular?
Anyway adding a nofollow to the link is not the right way to prevent that sort of thing. If you want to stop Google from indexing certain pages, use a robots.txt file.
Thread Starter
jmraab
(@jmraab)
Let me rephrase. From an SEO perspective, I do not want Google to give any value to the “Read More” link.
The Read More link points here:
http://www.domain.com/post-name/#more-17
The problem is that I would need to add some type of /#more wildcard to the robots.txt file, but because each post is unique (/#more-17, /#more-18, etc) I don’t think there is an easy way to do this.
The title already links to the permalink for the post, so I don’t need all of the /#more pages in Google’s index.
Thread Starter
jmraab
(@jmraab)
Okay, I found the fix for this. Here is what I edited:
in wp-includes/post-template.php I edited line 102 to include class=\”more-link\” within the link structure.
The only problem with this workaround is that whenever I upgrade, I’ll need to also make this hack in the new files. Maybe something for WP developers to consider?
I would expect Google to be smart enough to know that
http://www.domain.com/post-name/#more-17 and
http://www.domain.com/post-name/ both point to the same page. The #whatever is a standard way of pointing to the interior of a page, Google is not going to treat it as a separate URL.
You can add the nofollow if you want, but it doesn’t achieve what you think it does.
But it will bleed off page rank juice to that URL even if it doesn’t index it. So it’s just one more step to getting those # 1 rankings.
