On my Wordpress.org website I have a Privacy Policy, Contact us and Archives Pages.
All 3 are currently Index-ed, Follow, and included in my sitemap which is submitted to google and bing webmaster tools. And by the way, I'm using Wordpress SEO by Yoast...
So, I want to fix this up real quick... I just have 4 questions:
1. Noindex: My "Contact Us" page contains only a Contact form and 3 Photos (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) which each leads to the social network the photo represents. My "Privacy Policy" is just a generic one I got from the internet, from one of those free pp generators, and it's been just Slightly edited, very slightly, so it's 99% generic though. And my "Archives" page, well, you know how it is, just a bunch of links... Now, I believe I should make ALL 3 as "noindex", am I correct?
2. NofoIIow: I believe that the "Contact Us" and "Privacy Policy" pages should be nofoIIow because there is absolutely no point in the crawlers visiting those pages, there's nothing of value there for the crawlers/search engines, not really. While my "Archives" page may have some value, I believe. There are links to all my posts there, so the crawlers visiting that page can lead them to any other article on my site, which is good. I believe I should make the "Contact us" and "Privacy Policy" pages as nofoIIow, but leave the "Archives" page as dofoIIow, am I correct?
3. Sitemap: This is connected to the previous questions. I have 3 sitemaps submitted in webmaster tools, Posts, Categories and Pages. Now, if I put "noindex" and "nofoIIow" on the Privacy Policy and the Contact Us pages, and put just "noindex" on the Archives page, will the fact that they are included in my sitemap render the "noindex" and "nofoIIow" useless for Google, or interfere with that in any way, resulting in those pages being indexed and/or followed anyway? I believe that I should remove All 3 of these Pages from my sitemap, am I correct?
Note: Yoast has these 2 options related to the Sitemap for individual posts:
Include in Sitemap: Yes/No/Auto Detect.
Should this page be in the XML Sitemap at all times, regardless of Robots Meta settings?
Include in HTML Sitemap: Yes/No/Auto Detect.
Should this page be in the HTML Sitemap at all times, regardless of Robots Meta settings?
If the answer to Question 3 is that I should remove these Pages from my sitemap, then should I select No for both the "Sitemap (XML)" and the "HTML Sitemap", or just one or the other? Because as far as I know only the XML sitemap is submitted to webmaster tools, so maybe it's not smart to exclude from the HTML sitemap as well?
I could disable indexation of pages altogether from the Yoast's plugin settings, but I'd rather do it on a Page-by-Page basis, because eventually I may have Pages I want indexed and followed...
4. Last thing: There is also an option in Yoast on individual pages called "Meta Robots Advanced", and one of the options that can be selected there is "NoArchive", has that anything to do with my Archives page?
Thanks guys...