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
-
My some pages are not showing cached in Google, WHY?
I have website http://www.vipcollisionlv.com/ and when i check the cache status with tags **site:http:vipcollisionlv.com, **some page has no cache status..
Technical SEO | | 1akalyou can see this in image. How to resolve this issue. please help me.
0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page
I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users. Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page. However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page. I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?
Technical SEO | | JBlank0 -
Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?
I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.
Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont0 -
Page for Link Building
Hello guys, My question is about link building and reciprocal links. Since many directories request a reciprocal link, makes me wonder if is not better to create a unique page in the website only for this kind of links. What do you guys recommend? Thanks in advance, PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
Hotel affiliate website - noindex pages with little unique content?
We are well into development of a hotel affiliate website (using Expedia Affiliate Network), and I know there are many challenges to SEO when using an affiliate system - one of the biggest being how to handle duplicate content. Outside of blog posts and static marketing pages, the majority of the textual content is contained in hotel descriptions. We will be creating unique descriptions over time, but we are a small team and this will be a lengthy process. My question for you mozzers, is whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions? Thanks for any input!
Technical SEO | | CassisGroup0 -
External Linking & Your sites Link juice
Hey guys, quick question. Does a page lose link juice when it gives link juice? If I link to an outside site, do I lose that same amount of link juice or is it just applied to there site and not removed from mine? I understand that linking to a competitor can in turn help him and hurt me (if he then is seen as more relevant than me to google) but does it have a direct relation to hurting/removing my page link juice? Hope this all makes sense. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Rel=cannonical vs. noindex.follow for paginated pages
I"m working on a real estate site that has multiple listing pages, e.g. http://www.hhcrealestate.com/manhattan-beach-mls-real-estate-listings I'm trying to get the main result page to rank for that particular geo-keyword, i.e. "manhattan beach homes for sale". I want to make sure all of the individual listings on the paginated pages, 2,3, 4 etc. still get indexed. Is it better to add to all of the paginated pages, i.e.manhattan-beach-mls-real-estate-listings-2, manhattan-beach-mls-real-estate-listings--3, manhattan-beach-mls-real-estate-listings-4, etc. or is it better to add noindex,follow to those pages?
Technical SEO | | fthead91