Noindex, nofollow on a blog since 2009
-
Just reviewed a WordPress blog that was launched in 2009 but somehow the privacy setting was to not index it, so all this time there's been a noindex, nofollow meta tag in the header. The client couldn't figure out why masses of content wasn't showing up in search results.
I've fixed the setting and assume Google will spider in short order; the blog is a subdirectory of their main site. My question is whether there is anything else I can or should do. Can Google recognize the age of the content, or that it once had a noindex meta tag? Will it "date" the blog as of today? Has the client lost out on untold benefits from the long history of content creation? I imagine that link juice from any backlinks to the blog will now flow back to the main site; think that's true?
Just curious what others might think of this scenario and whether any other action is warranted.
-
Thanks Dan. One thing I found interesting is that Google Webmaster Tools doesn't offer any alerts about pages that aren't indexed because of meta tags, only about those included in the robots.txt file.
-
Hi
Great responses Matt and Ben, thanks!! Only things I could add are;
Webmaster Tools
- Check google webmaster tools every few days for the first 2-3 weeks.
- You may turn up some 404s or other types of errors that should be corrected.
- And keep your eyes out for any other warnings
Analytics
- You're going to spike your traffic (potentially, hopefully) in analytics big time, or at least skew the data
- Use filters and advanced segments to separate blog traffic so you can still analyze things even after a potential spike in blog search traffic.
- At minimum make an annotation of the date you made it indexable.
Dates
- Regarding the dates, I did come across this recently - I have not tested, so please take it with a grain of salt - removing dates from the SERPs - I would only recommend trying it if the content was not "time sensitive" (like a cooking recipe).
Hope all this helps!
-Dan
-
Thanks for the clarification Ben. I think I'll leave older posts as is. They've been actively posting several times a week, so there should be enough fresh content. My hope is that Google recognizes the age of the blog because it's my understanding that age factors in the ranking algorithm.
-
Ahh yeah my bad, ignore that bit. I think you'd still want to make a subtle change to each post so WordPress can set the date updated flag on the sitemap to today, that way Google will put a higher priority on the content when indexing your site.
-
Thanks, the site maps are a good idea. Ben, I'm not sure what you mean about making the content different to what Google has in its index. Because of the meta tag, it doesn't have any content in its index, right?
-
You've done the most important step (removing the noindex/nofollow) tags. The only additional thing I would do is submit (or resubmit) the XML sitemap to Google. Make sure that XML sitemap is perfect and error free so that you don't create any additional errors.
Google should be smart enough to recognize the dates. I've never had a situation where it was years between publish and index. I have however had situations where it was days or weeks in between publish and index and in those situations Google has recognize the date. I'd imagine the same is true here (assuming of course, you have the date in a recognizable format and don't change the date to today).
I'd be curious to find out what happens. Definitely update this Q&A when you find out what happens!
-
I would probably re-arrange some of the paragraphs (or add some more content) to the old posts and update them in WordPress, this then makes the content different to what Google has in its index.
I would then use the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin to regenerate your sitemap. Since you've updated and added new content to the posts their last updated date would have changed so Google will probably see this as revised content. I would submit to all major search engines as your first port of call.
In terms of the "link juice", I would say that Google will still count links to the article as a ranking factor, but because you have noindex the content wont appear in search results. So the content will have a fairly good page rank (possibly) but its being held back by the exclusion of the search engine index.
Now that the setting has been changed and the sitemap / content has been updated you should start to see the results in the search results in due time.
You could also add a few new articles of content to the blog and publicise that over social media to help get back in the game a bit quicker.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website blog is hacked. Whats the best practice to remove bad urls
Hello So our site was hacked which created a few thousand spam URLs on our domain. We fixed the issue and changed all the spam urls now return 404. Google index shows a couple of thousand bad URLs. My question is- What's the fastest way to remove the URLs from google index. I created a site map with sof the bad urls and submitted to Google. I am hoping google will index them as they are in the sitemap and remove from the index, as they return 404. Any tools to get a full list of google index? ( search console downloads are limited to 1000 urls). A Moz site crawl gives larger list which includes URLs not in Google index too. Looking for a tool that can download results from a site: search. Any way to remove the URLs from the index in bulk? Removing them one by one will take forever. Any help or insight would be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | ajiabs1 -
Are links still considered reciprocal if the link from one website is rel="nofollow" and the other isnt ?
Im working on a site that has some press coverage due in the next couple of days from quite a big site in the niche. The press outlet has requested that we link back to the content they post about us, they said the link can be rel="nofollow" if we'd prefer. Id really like to get the full benefit of the link back to our website, obviously if i did a straight link back to the 3rd party press site the links would be reciprocal and cancel each other out in terms of "link juice", but i was wandering if we make our link back to the 3rd party rel="nofollow" will we still get the full benefit of their link to us in terms of link juice ? ie. having the link back to them, but nofollow wouldn't been seen as a reciprocal link. ? (Obviously either way there is still benefit of having the link even if it reciprocal as it will send traffic to our site, but just no "link juice") Note - Ive used the phrase"Link Juice" for lack of a better term, any ideas on how else to refer to this ?
Technical SEO | | Sam-P1 -
Htaccess help... I moved my blog from a seperate domain to newdomain.com/blog
Hi, I need help with my htaccess file, I've been told. I moved a blog i had hosted somewhere else to a directory on my ecommerce site. I was told i would need to write something to go in the htaccess file so the sites would not become duplicate content, but I'm a novice and have no idea how to write that code. blog moved from www.whosyourmoondoggie.com to www.moondoggieinc.com/blog Please help, or direct me to the right tutorial 🙂 Thanks! KristyO
Technical SEO | | KristyO0 -
302 Redirects for Wordpress Blog Trackbacks
I'm a newbie, and just got my first crawl diagnostics report. I was looking at the temporary redirects, and virtually all of them are trackback URLs from our blog (we use ourdomain.com/blog and Wordpress). The diagnostics report says they're 302 redirects. Is this problematic and, if so, can you suggest the best way to fix the problem? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | sally580 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Generating a Sitemap for websites linked to a wordpress blog
Greetings, I'm looking for a way to generate a sitemap that will include static pages on my home directory, as well as my wordpress blog. The site that I'm trying to build this for is in a temporary folder, and can be accessed at http://www.lifewaves.com/Website 3.0 I plan on moving the contents of this folder to the root directory for lifewaves.com whenever we are go for launch. What I'm wondering is, is there a way to build a sitemap or sitemap index that will point to the static pages of my site, as well as the wordpress blog while taking advantage of the built in wordpress hierarchy? If so, what's an easy way to do this. I have generated a sitemap using Yoast, but I can't seem to find any xml files within the wordpress folder. Within the plugin is a button that I can click to access the sitemap index, but it just brings me to the homepage of my blog. Can I build a sitemap index that points to a sitemap for the static pages as well as the sitemap generated by yoast? Thank you in advance for your help!! P.S. I'm kind of a noob.
Technical SEO | | WaveMaker0 -
Moving Blog to Custom Domain
Hi All - I am currently attempting to move a blog (companyname.blogspot.com) that has a 2/10 GPR to a custom domain name so that I can get my targeted keywords in the domain name. The new domain will just be www.targetedkeyword.com. There are easy instructions for doing this with the A record and CNAME changes in the Blogger help, but I am worried about losing rank and links if I do this. Can you guys help me understand what the ramifications would be, and how I can accomplish this without losing the 2/10 mojo? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0 -
302 vs. a href="nofollow"
we came across one thing the we did not asked to programm by our intention. we have a magento shop and on the produktpage we have those "compare" buttons. these link have a session id and the follow a 302 back onto the same page. so i beleive the idea is that google will just not follow 302s and thats it. so my questions is: is this right what we beleive if so why is a 302 better compared to a a href="nofollow" ???
Technical SEO | | kynop0