Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    15
    2557
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Ouzan
      Ouzan last edited by

      Hi,

      My programmer recently did a horrible mistkae by adding noindex, nofollow to our website without me noticing for two days.

      At the same time he did it we bought a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new domain:

      The Old domain is: http://www.websitebuildersworld.com

      and the new one is: http://www.websiteplanet.com

      Now unfortunatly I didn't notice the noindex,nofollow when it was on the old domain and I redirected it to websiteplanet.com before I fixed the noindex, nofollow.

      I fixed the problem around 10 hours ago on the new domain (www.websiteplanet.com)

      but the old domain didn't get indexed back (yet), so for example if you search for WebsiteBuildersWorld in google you will not reach the homepage as google deleted it because of the noindex,nofollow.

      My question is:
      Do you think that it will be fixed and google will retrieve websitebuildersworld homepage to his search results and then redirect it to websiteplanet?

      Or because I redirected websitebuildersworld.com to websiteplanet.com before letting google crawling websitebuildersworld.com without the noindex,no follow it wouldn't get indexed again?

      I hope I explained the problem good enough.

      Looking forward for your valuable replies.

      Thanks.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Ouzan
        Ouzan @Ouzan last edited by

        Hi Andrea,

        Thanks for your replies.

        I decided to retrieve the old domain and do 302 redirect from the new domain to the old one.

        I will let google index the old one completely once again and only then i will do 301.

        Would love to hear what you think about that.

        Thanks,
        Eliran.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • josh-riley
          josh-riley @Ouzan last edited by

          Here's the concept at its core: how can Google crawl redirects and index new pages if it can't crawl those redirects to get to the new pages and process the 301s?

          Fix that to fix your problem. The link I shared has a lot of good comments very centered on this general topic.

          And, I am intentionally avoiding giving an absolute solution to you because, quite frankly, I don't know enough or am involved at all in your site to feel comfortable doing so. Strategically, I'm happy to share ideas/best practices.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Ouzan
            Ouzan @Ouzan last edited by

            Hi **Andrea,
            Thanks for your reply. **

            I have no worries about google getting me back to my rankings, I am sure he will.

            The main problem is as you quoted:  "In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied."

            Are you suggesting that I need to put websitebuildersworld.com domain backup and let google re-crawl it and only then redirect it?

            Thanks,
            Eliran.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Ouzan
              Ouzan @Ouzan last edited by

              The reason that comes up to my mind is that basically I didn't let google see WebsiteBuildersWorld.com without the noindex,nofollow removal fix so he wouldn't know what to redirect or something like that because the last time he visited websitebuilderworld.com he saw noindex,nofollow and now he can't visit it anymore because he is being redirected to websiteplanet.com

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • AdamThompson
                AdamThompson @Ouzan last edited by

                "maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?"

                I'm not 100% certain, but I can't think of any reason you would need to do that.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Ouzan
                  Ouzan @Ouzan last edited by

                  Hi Adam,

                  Yes this is what I thought.
                  But I also had a weird thought that maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?

                  As for a' and b' yes I will do that.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • josh-riley
                    josh-riley @Ouzan last edited by

                    I think I get what you mean and this stuff can get a bit tricky - first and foremost, it can take days/weeks/months to get things unclogged after an issue like this and there's no promise you'll get exactly the same ranking as you had before.

                    Getting back to your original question, and not to kick you when you are down, however, Google never recommends moving an entire site at once because you don't catch major things like this. Now, to your question, here's answer: "In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied." I think that's what you are trying to get at?

                    There's more info here that may be worth you reading through:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • AdamThompson
                      AdamThompson @Ouzan last edited by

                      I think I understand. Since your site was de-indexed, Google has to start over indexing your site on the new domain. This is what should happen:

                      Google will follow any external links it finds pointing to your site, will find the 301 redirect, and will follow that to your new site. Google will then crawl your new domain. Google will "forward" most of the link juice from your backlinks to your new domain.

                      Via your internal link structure, the forwarded PageRank will be spread throughout your site. This will hopefully result in you regaining the rankings you previously had.

                      I assume you have forwarded each subpage on the old domain to the same page on the new domain?

                      I would also:

                      a) if you can, change over at least some of your backlinks to point to your new domain

                      b) build/attract links to your new domain

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • Ouzan
                        Ouzan @Ouzan last edited by

                        The thing is that I didn't 'give' google the chance to index the website again with the old domain after I fixed the noindex,nofollow.

                        Quite hard to explain, but do you get what I mean?

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • AdamThompson
                          AdamThompson @Ouzan last edited by

                          Oh, OK. Then I would say: yes, you should regain your rankings, though it's possible it will take time. Some SEOs have reported it takes several months to regain their rankings after switching domains, but I personally have not had that issue.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Ouzan
                            Ouzan @AdamThompson last edited by

                            Hi Adam,

                            Thanks for your reply, but it wasn't really my question I afraid.

                            The thing is that I wonder if google will index back all our results and put them back in their spots and just redirect to the new domain.

                            Thanks,
                            Eliran.

                            AdamThompson Ouzan josh-riley 10 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • AdamThompson
                              AdamThompson last edited by

                              Google is not going to index http://www.websitebuildersworld.com, because it redirects to http://www.websiteplanet.com. Google won't index a domain that redirects to another domain. It will index the domain where the content is hosted.

                              Ouzan 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • Ouzan
                                Ouzan @Andropenis_Australia last edited by

                                Hi,

                                Thanks for your reply, much appreciated.

                                Yes the sitemap is submitted in WMT, thd old domain sitemap and the new domain sitemap.

                                So in your opinion everything should be back to normal, correct?

                                and yes, very big stuff 😞 , he uploaded the Header from the demo file with the noindex,nofollow... caused me to lose a lot of money and I around 80% of my pages including homepage got deleted from SERP's.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • Andropenis_Australia
                                  Andropenis_Australia last edited by

                                  Go into WMT if you have an account and resubi your sitemap for websitebuildersword.com, or simply google suggest site or something similar and find where you can submit your site to google again.

                                  It should get indexed again anyway, because you should have some links out there somewhere that the bots will detect and go to your site from.

                                  Quite a big stuff up though, on your programmers part.

                                  Good luck 🙂

                                  Ouzan 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                  • 1 / 1
                                  • First post
                                    Last post

                                  Got a burning SEO question?

                                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                  Start my free trial


                                  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.

                                  • See all categories

                                  Related Questions

                                  • Luke_Proctor

                                    Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?

                                    Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor
                                    0
                                  • 94501

                                    Sanity Check: NoIndexing a Boatload of URLs

                                    Hi, I'm working with a Shopify site that has about 10x more URLs in Google's index than it really ought to. This equals thousands of urls bloating the index. Shopify makes it super easy to make endless new collections of products, where none of the new collections has any new content... just a new mix of products. Over time, this makes for a ton of duplicate content. My response, aside from making other new/unique content, is to select some choice collections with KW/topic opportunities in organic and add unique content to those pages. At the same time, noindexing the other 90% of excess collections pages. The thing is there's evidently no method that I could find of just uploading a list of urls to Shopify to tag noindex. And, it's too time consuming to do this one url at a time, so I wrote a little script to add a noindex tag (not nofollow) to pages that share various identical title tags, since many of them do. This saves some time, but I have to be careful to not inadvertently noindex a page I want to keep. Here are my questions: Is this what you would do? To me it seems a little crazy that I have to do this by title tag, although faster than one at a time. Would you follow it up with a deindex request (one url at a time) with Google or just let Google figure it out over time? Are there any potential negative side effects from noindexing 90% of what Google is already aware of? Any additional ideas? Thanks! Best... Mike

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 94501
                                    0
                                  • Fulanito

                                    Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?

                                    I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito
                                    1
                                  • Carissamay

                                    Why is my domain authority still 1?

                                    I changed the domain of my website from www.vanillacrush.co.uk to www.carissamay.co.uk at the end of December and yet my DA for carissamay is still 1. As advised, I set up a 301 redirect from VC to CM which seems to be working fine. However when I check on redirect detective it tells me I also have a 302 set up. Could this be confusing things? http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk/ http://www.carissamay.co.uk Any help would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carissamay
                                    0
                                  • chiplab

                                    Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP

                                    Good morning, This is my first post.  I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com).  On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace  the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday.  If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab
                                    0
                                  • webbmason

                                    Domain Forwarding - SEO Impacts?

                                    I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com.  Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webbmason
                                    0
                                  • WebServiceConsulting.com

                                    NoIndexing Massive Pages all at once: Good or bad?

                                    If you have a site with a few thousand high quality and authoritative pages, and tens of thousands with search results and tags pages with thin content, and noindex,follow the thin content pages all at once, will google see this is a good or bad thing? I am only trying to do what Google guidelines suggest, but since I have so many pages index on my site, will throwing the noindex tag on ~80% of thin content pages negatively impact my site?

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com
                                    0
                                  • AdeLewis

                                    How long should a domain redirect take?

                                    Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
                                    Ade.

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
                                    0

                                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                  Start my free trial
                                  Products
                                  • Moz Pro
                                  • Moz Local
                                  • Moz API
                                  • Moz Data
                                  • STAT
                                  • Product Updates
                                  Moz Solutions
                                  • SMB Solutions
                                  • Agency Solutions
                                  • Enterprise Solutions
                                  • Digital Marketers
                                  Free SEO Tools
                                  • Domain Authority Checker
                                  • Link Explorer
                                  • Keyword Explorer
                                  • Competitive Research
                                  • Brand Authority Checker
                                  • Local Citation Checker
                                  • MozBar Extension
                                  • MozCast
                                  Resources
                                  • Blog
                                  • SEO Learning Center
                                  • Help Hub
                                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                  • How-to Guides
                                  • Moz Academy
                                  • API Docs
                                  About Moz
                                  • About
                                  • Team
                                  • Careers
                                  • Contact
                                  Why Moz
                                  • Case Studies
                                  • Testimonials
                                  Get Involved
                                  • Become an Affiliate
                                  • MozCon
                                  • Webinars
                                  • Practical Marketer Series
                                  • MozPod
                                  Connect with us

                                  Contact the Help team

                                  Join our newsletter
                                  Moz logo
                                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                  • Accessibility
                                  • Terms of Use
                                  • Privacy

                                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.