To Follow or Not To Follow...... ?
-
So, Im working in house with a large company. They have a number of sites which are in need of content up dates etc. In looking around, I noticed
meta name = 'robots'content='noindex,nofollow'
The IT person here who has influence as to what is or is not done; says it should stay that way.
It is my understanding and please correct me if I am wrong..... we generally would like pages followed and indexed.
I'm pretty sure by optimizing on page and making this change it could help the site.....
Thanks for your consideration!!!!
-
I hear ya.
Thank you!
-
Its a simple fix, just have to go up the chain of command w/out ruffling feathers..... I am the new guy.
Thank you.
-
Well it's not really destroyed, that implies a penalty. This is completely reversible.
Just remove the roxots.txt and noindex blocks and the site will come back.
-
Congratulations.
You have a client who has successfully destroyed their own ranking in google.
Aleutianadventures.com - Index of
<cite>www.aleutianadventures.com/</cite>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
-
-
That means the site is entirely blocked. Are you sure the main pages are not being allowed to be indexed? Do a site: search in Google.com to see what is indexed.I would really be surprised if the entire site was intentionally blocked.
If there are main pages indexed he might have intentionally blocked out a large group of low content pages as a response to combating panda. But even in that case they should probably noindex,follow it.
Share the URL and we can take a look.
-
Thank you for the responses... kinda what I thought...
-
My thoughts exactly thank you sir!
-
Mike Davis's answer pretty much hits it on the head. If every page is marked NoIndex,NoFollow then no one will ever find your site unless you specifically direct them to it or they know it exists already... which means you're missing out on a large potential customer base from organic traffic that won't ever be able to find you.
Hell, even those content updates won't matter because the search engines aren't going to care about it (since you told them not to index it) and won't be able to see newer content deeper into the site (since you told it not to follow anything on the page).
-
It really depends on what they want. If your client does not want the search engines to index their site (for whatever reason) than that is correct. I am at a loss as to why they would do that. Tell the "IT" guy that no search engine will lists you guys with this tag on every page. I understand some pages should not be indexed, but an entire site seems counter intuitive. Why would someone want a website if they don't want to be found? It sounds like someone who thinks they know something when they obviously do not.
Tell them to switch all their tags to:
-
all pages
-
Just a bit of clarification needed... what pages are marked "noindex, nofollow"? Sometimes NoIndex,NoFollow or NoIndex,Follow can be useful for certain pages.
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
-
Do Search Engines Try To Follow Phone Number Links
Any SEO thoughts on using rel="nofollow" when inserting a link to a phone number? To make a phone number click to call we use (555) 555-1234 Wondering if search engines are trying to follow that link or if this is standard and not to worry. Any thoughts on if I should add rel="nofollow" to these or does it not matter? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Lions-Pro0 -
Do-follow or no follow?
What kind of link i should give when i mention someone in a blog, If they already have a better DA then my site.
On-Page Optimization | | jogindergujela0 -
Can we use internal no-follow links without negatively affecting rankings
we are creating a site structure for a travel website. the site homepage has a top navigation bar with 8 top level links and a total link count of 33 links in this (within menus). There are also 10 footer and ad-hoc links As this top navigation bar is a site-wide navigation, when entering s specific "travel destination" page, the "travel destination" page has its own contextual links and reference links, making the total inks on the destination page approx 107. do you think its ok to make all links in the top navigation bar no follow on all pages except the homepage? how would you approach this to create less links to maintain effective link-juice flow to required pages
On-Page Optimization | | Direct_Ram0 -
NOINDEX, FOLLOW on product page - how about images indexing?
Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird12290 -
Using Canonical & INDEX, FOLLOW meta tag
I am sort of new to this, and working with an overseas development team on an eCommerce site. I am curious if the Canonical tag will supersede the tag, or if it is best to remove this tag entirely for duplicate product pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BretDarby1 -
Is it convinient to use No-Index, Follow to my Paginated Pages?
I have a website http://www.naukrigulf.com and it has a lot of Paginated pages on its SERP and most of paginated pages are getting indexed in Google SERP. Is it beneficial to use No-Index, Follow to keep the link equity to main (first page), although we have already used rel=next and rel=prev. If Answer is "yes" is their any harm by using no-index, follow with rel=next, rel=prev.
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Followed seomoz advice for on page tweaks but dropped
Hi all We followed seomoz advice regarding on-page tweaks for this page: http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/agency-agreement.html Dropped 10 places by Google UK. Obviously could be a coincidence, but any on-page critique very gladly received. (But also seem to have been dropped by Google across the board in the past week or so. Usual trouble of trying to find causes. But specific page advice would be a start and much appreciated.) Regards P
On-Page Optimization | | dexm100 -
Page Analysis on our asp.net site is showing the following for HTML Text - //
paintball-online.com This is consistent on every page, despite these pages having text. I assume the SEOMoz tool is working just fine and we have a coding issue that may be hindering our SEO efforts. Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Istoresinc0