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Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?
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I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them?
I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.)
Thanks!
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Completely agree with Ryan.
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In general it's a best practice to noindex the thank you pages as people landing on them from outside of your conversion funnel will trigger false goal completions. No following them is fine as well since they're a low value content wise, but ideally you want to make them as hard to stumble upon as possible. It's a good idea to remove them from the sitemap too if they've propagated there. Cheers!
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