"INDEX,FOLLOW" then later in the code "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" which does google follow?
-
background info: we have an established closed E-commerce system which the company has been using for years. I have only just started and reviewing the system, I don't have direct access to the code, but can request changes, but it could take months before the changes are in effect (or done at all), and we won't can't change to a new E-commerce system for the short to mid term.
While reviewing the site (with help of seomoz crawl diagnostics) I noticed that some of the existing "landing pages" have in the code:
<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">INDEX,FOLLOW</a>" /> then a few lines later
<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</a>" />
Which the crawl diagnostics flagged up, but in the webmaster tools says
"We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site."so the question is which instructions does google follow? the first or 2nd?
note: clearly this is need fixed, but I have a big list of changes for the system so I need to know how important this is
tthanks
-
I've never actually had any errors listed for non-indexable content in the HTML Improvements section of WMT. So I'm not 100% sure what would set off that notification. Though the sites I work on do have a number of pages that are NoIndex and/or NoFollow. So i guess the issue would be caused not by purposefully blocking the page but some other means that makes your page unable to be crawled properly.
-
Yeah I did that after posting the question I started test like that, but its not coming up and searching the url does not show the page, but other normal pages ("lower" pages) are showing (that don't have this problem), so it seems that it is de-indexed those pages.
its weird that webmaster tools say ""We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site.", when there are.
Getting this sorted one way or another is my top priority
-
If you copy a string of text on the page and paste it into google search, does your page show up in the results? If so, then its being indexed despite the second robots tag. If it doesn't show up, then its not being indexed. So importance would rely on whether you want that page to be indexed and whether or not it is being indexed. Either way, you should look into cleaning that up at some point.
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
-
Should I nofollow/noindex the outgoing links in a news aggregator website?
We have a news aggregator site that has 2 types of pages: First Type:
Technical SEO | | undaranfahujakia
Category pages like economic, sports or political news and we intend to do SEO on these category pages to get organic traffic. These pages have pagination and show the latest and most viewed news on the corresponding category. Second Type:
News headlines from other sites are displayed on the category pages. The user will be directed to that news page on the main site by clicking on a link. These links are outgoing links and we redirect them by JavaScript (not 301).
In fact these are our websites articles that just have titles (linked to destination) and meta descriptions (reads from news RSS). Question:
Should we have to nofollow/noindex the second type of links? In fact, since the crawl budget of websites is limited, isn't it better to spend this budget on the pages we have invested in (first type)?0 -
Google index graph duration in Google Webmaster Tools
Hello guys, I wonder, my sites are currently being indexed every 7 days, exactly. At Index Status page in GWT. However, this new site gets updated almost everyday, how can I ask google to index faster and more frequently/almost daily? Is it about SItemap.xml frequency ? I changed it today to Daily. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mdmoz0 -
Google Webmaster tools Sitemap submitted vs indexed vs Index Status
I'm having an odd error I'm trying to diagnose. Our Index Status is growing and is now up to 1,115. However when I look at Sitemaps we have 763 submitted but only 134 indexed. The submitted and indexed were virtually the same around 750 until 15 days ago when the indexed dipped dramatically. Additionally when I look under HTML improvements I only find 3 duplicate pages, and I ran screaming frog on the site and got similar results, low duplicates. Our actual content should be around 950 pages counting all the category pages. What's going on here?
Technical SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below, Can you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Sitemaps and "noindex" pages
Experimenting a little bit to recover from Panda and added "noindex" tag for quite a few pages. Obviously now we need Google to re-crawl them ASAP and de-index. Should we leave these pages in sitemaps (with updated "lastmod") for that? Or just patiently wait? 🙂 What's the common/best way?
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Rel="external"
Hi all, I got a link and its off a site and marked up with rel="external". Is this a followed or nofollowed link? Does it pass link juice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sharer0 -
How "Optimised" is my home page content
Good afternoon from 1 degrees C overcast frozen wetherby UK... I've made a number of on page html markup changes to optimise the page for steel suppliers steel stockholders but I'd like to know if there are any other on page improvments I could make for this page http://www.barrettsteel.com/ Im particulary concerned that contnet in in li tags and not p, could this be an issue? And finaaly on the home page a third party developer has slapped a header banner pointing to an external site know as woodberry tools, that cant be good can it? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0