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I have a sitemap on my site, which includes all users from the site. On the user profile page, tho, I don't want google to index all users, only those with more than 10 posts, so I've added a meta "nofollow" tag to all users with less than 10 posts.

My question is, what is stronger so to speak, the sitemap or the nofollow rule? Will google index all users (the rule in the sitemap), or will it take the nofollow tag in consideration too when it gets to a profile page with less than 10 posts?

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    Sitemap is advisory only while nofollow is an instruction. Therefore nofollow > sitemap.
    – LazyOne
    Sep 18, 2011 at 19:03

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You're actually using the wrong directive. Meta nofollow doesn't do what you think:

Originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page.

What you want is the noindex directive:

To entirely prevent a page's contents from being listed in the Google web index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag.

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  • Oh sorry, I meant noindex, I got confused and didn't check the source code. I was using noindex, but thanks.
    – Eduard Luca
    Sep 19, 2011 at 11:00
  • Then it works how LazyOne described in comments. The sitemap is only a suggestion versus noindex being a directive.
    – Su'
    Sep 19, 2011 at 17:26

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