Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
-
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow".
Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator.
Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be...
Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check?
Thanks!
-
Well you're on Wordpress and are using YoastSEO. When a Wordpress category is created, a URL is generated for that category.
Your sitemap was created with Yoast:
Sitemap Last Modified |
|
- 2018-08-23 08:10 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:21 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:08 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-07 10:40 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:10 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:13 +01:00
|
I can see your articles are indexed now, but I would still recommend removing the Wordpress category URL's from your sitemap. Since the sitemap is commonly used for the things you want Google to crawl and index, I would add the article urls and content with "index,follow" webpages directly to your xml sitemap instead of linking the category pages you don't want indexed.
(IE: ie: http://www.genetex.com/sitemap.xml)
Yoast should give you this option in the settings for xml sitemap generation. If not, I would recommend using Screaming Frog to generate the sitemap.
-
Just as an update to this question, I submitted XML sitemaps directly to the blog articles and those pages are still not showing in the Google SERPs. It seems that new pages are discovered quite quickly (as per Google Alerts) but are then dropped from the index within a day or so.
The only pages which are returned consistently are links to the page which allows comments to be added.
The links which were initially identified as broken, were not actually broken so there was nothing to fix there.
Next step I can think of is to attempt some page sculpting by setting a noindex on the comments pages...
If anyone has any more thoughts or ideas, I'd appreciate your input
-
Great - thanks for your help
-
I resubmitted the sitemap for the blog in GWT and no errors were found...
I have to say I am v surprised at the number of dead links - we don't have that many blog posts so unless this is indicating content on our main site (where the pages are still . Even then, as I mentioned to Alan, the only missing content Google Webmaster Tools picks up on is where event tracking is used and it thinks the label is a link.... I did ask Google about these erroneous missing page and they said there was nothing that can be done to indicate they're not meant to be pages and that it would not affect the site's quality.
BTW, An article we published a few hours ago is now showing up in the Google results so it does seem like the rest of the pages have been penalised
Time to figure out what's going on with the missing pages...
Thanks, Irving
-
i sent the list, i had a bit of a look and it may be that they were timing out
-
Thanks Alan, have DM'ed you.
-
Submit a sitemap.xml file for these pages you want indexed, If they are linked to on the site and not blocked in robots.txt they will get indexed again. Definitely fix that sick amount of broken links, Google could be determining that these pages are not worth anything because the links on them are all dead ends.
-
The broken links were found using the Bing api. so bing will see them as such,
If yougive me a email, i willl send you the list
-
39 no-index pages on the blog could be correct with the category pages.
I'm quite surprised at the number of broken links - is this specific to /blog and are they actual links? GWT usually picks up event tracking as broken links...
Good point about the homepage - I should get a canonical tag on that...
Thanks!
-
I found 39 pages that have been no-index, does that add up?
I also found 33,000 broken links.
anouther problem you have is that both http://www.abcam.com/blog/ and http://www.abcam.com/blog/index.cfm are linked to in your site, this means that the pagerank is split. you should link to only http://www.abcam.com/blog/
-
The blog homepage is http://www.abcam.com/blog
@Alan: The rest of the site is indexable, just the the blog area where noindex has been used (the blog homepage and category pages are auto-generated and repeat a lot of the content in the articles)
@Shailendra: Yes, they were indexed - the last Google Alert which specifically highlights content from the blog is mid-June.
-
Firstly, you don't need to write index,follow on normal pages. Secondly, as you say, "no longer showing in Google SERPs", this means that it was earlier indexed, right? Now if it is no longer in Google's index, it means penalization. Please give the url of your website.
-
It may have something to do with the homepage being noindex, as that is unusual.
Can we get a url, I may find what you missed?
-
Hi,
Can you please share URL ?
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
Disavow links old links
We have built a lot of sites and there a few sites we no longer manage or want any association with. When I have looked at webmasters I can see 20 to 200+ odd links back to our site. The page however at source has no reference to our website. I have searched the code but there isn't anything. Is it safe to disavow these or just leave them?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Should a login page for a payroll / timekeeping comp[any be no follow for robots.txt?
I am managing a Timekeeping/Payroll company. My question is about the customer login page. Would this typically be nofollow for robots?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Noindex Pages indexed
I'm having problem that gogole is index my search results pages even though i have added the "noindex" metatag. Is the best thing to block the robot from crawling that file using robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Tedred0 -
Can you have multiple rich snippets show up for the same page
Is it possible to have multiple rich snippets show up in the SERPs for the same page?For example, could a product page have both the aggregate review rich snippet and also the author thumbnail?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Why aren't certain links showing in SEOMOZ?
Hi, I have been trying to understand our page rank and domains that are linking to us. When I look at the list of linking domains, I see some bigger ones are missing and I don't know why. For example, we are in the Yahoo Directory with a link to trophycentral.com, but SEOMOZ is not showing the link. If SEOMOZ is not seeing it, my guess is Google is not either, which concerns me. There are several onther high page rank domains also not showing. Anyone have any idea why? Thanks! BTW, our domain is trophycentral.com
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Why does this page show it has 166 links in the crawll?
http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=213 This is a page that shows up as having over a 100 links in the crawl, however I don't understand where those links are coming from?
Technical SEO | | ENSO0 -
No Following Existing Non-SEO Pages A Good Idea?
Greetings! Is there an advantage in no-following links to pages like "Terms Of Use" and "Privacy Policy"... pages one isn't trying to rank for? Of course, the idea would be to not waste link juice on unimportant pages. Your thoughts? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 945010