Meta Robots query
-
Hi guys,
I was ranking really well on my home page for certain keywords which has all dropped pretty dramatically over the last 3/4 weeks - I think the issue is since since the configuration of Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin.
In March (when my rankings were strong) my crawl test showed the top data in the attached image, and in May (now the rankings have dropped severly) they show the bottom data.
I don't fully understand canonical and Meta Robots so I am hoping someone can shed some light on the following points.
1. Will the change result in my loss of rankings.
2. How can I put it back to how it was in March?PS. I haven't had any Google penalties.
Thanks,
Joshua -
Hi Joshua
Thanks, I see the ranking drop. However, have you lost traffic? I see most positions were on the 2nd page to begin with. I see this quite often, when sites don't rank on page #1, the rankings can drop/jump a lot around pages 2-5. I know it's not fun seeing a "drop" but ultimately I would focus on your traffic as a mindset.
I ask if this is a fairly new site, because it's a super competitive niche, and I'm surprised it ranked that well to begin with. If it's a new site, often Google will rank it higher for a little while to see how users react to it, and then it may settle back to a more "normal" ranking.
I'd also check your Search Analytics report in Search Console - do you see Impression and Position drops across the board? It's tempting to analyze only a few top keywords, but I'd try to look at things as a whole too.
-
Hi Joshua
The noodp would not be playing a role in this. It only instructs Google to not use data from the Open Directory Project in snippets, but has no other effect at all.
-
Rankings drop:
On April 14th all of these rankings dropped on the same day by 10+ places and have got worse since.
-
Hi Dan,
The issue seems to be that since I installed Yoast SEO and have had sitewide noodp activated that the rankings have dropped.
Do you think this could be playing a part?
Thanks,
Joshua
-
Hi Joshua
The settings look OK - what keywords were you ranking for that have now dropped? Also, when was the site launched?
-Dan
-
Can anyone help further with this?
-
Hi Eric,
Thanks a lot for your reply.
I wonder how it is possible that when the website was set to block robots, no index & follow and no rel-canonical it was ranking really well and since the change it has severly dropped?
What are the best settings to have for my home page which has most of the backlinks pointing to it?
Thanks,
Joshua -
Joshua, it looks as if you turned on the canonical tag on a certain page. Usually you will have the canonical tag added to a page when it's generating duplicate content--and you want that page to be considered to be "combined" with the page you're "canonicaling" to.
So, if you have a product that comes in several colors, those "color" pages will canonical back to the main product page.
The meta noindex, follow tag really shouldn't be used in most cases, if you're going to stop the search engines from indexing a page on your site, you should consider if you really need that page on the site anyway.
In the screen shot you provide, you're not giving me enough information about which pages on your site you're canonicaling from--so I can't give you specific advice on that. But to answer your question, these settings can definitely affect rankings.
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
-
Missing Meta Description in Pop Up Image Gallery URL
Hi there, Moz has reported that I have a lot of missing meta description in the Pop Up Image Gallery. There are over 150 of these that are missing. The issue is that in our CMS I cannot add meta description to images. I am also not entirely sure why the images I am loading up are generating their own URL like the one below. Possibly that is why Moz is saying it needs a meta description when it is only an image?. An example of the link that has missing meta description that I can't add would be something like this: http://www.domianhere.com/products/PopUpImageGallery/93/1?iframe=true When clicking these links it is purely an image with no text. So basically I am asking how do you add a meta description to a Pop Up image Gallery photo URL and/or possibly why would an image create a custom URL so I have to put in a Meta Description? Hopefully that makes sense, thank you in advance for your help - much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | marketing-gal0 -
MOZ Toolbar 3.0: Can't Find the Meta Description On My Page, Why?
Hey, The new MOZ toolbar is unable to identify the meta description on any of the pages for my doman www.1099pro.com. Is there any reason that someone can see why that would be? The tag should be correct on all pages. Thanks! -Mike
Moz Pro | | Stew2220 -
Fix Missing Meta-Description?
We have a Wordpress site. SEOMoz crawl diagnostics are showing 144 missing meta-description tags. The problem is that about 100 are blog pages: http://www.portlandpersonalinjuryaccidentlawyer.com/blog/page/15/ http://www.portlandpersonalinjuryaccidentlawyer.com/blog/page/16/ http://www.portlandpersonalinjuryaccidentlawyer.com/blog/page/17/ Etc. We have a meta-description for http://www.portlandpersonalinjuryaccidentlawyer.com/blog/ but not for every page.... is this a problem? How can we fix it? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | DuBois0 -
Does the page authority data also considers the on page factors like the presence of keyword in the title,meta text, and keyword frequency ??
The moz difficulty score considers four factors for the top websites. are the on page factors included in the page authority data ?
Moz Pro | | iQuanti0 -
How to remove URLS from from crawl diagnostics blocked by robots.txt
I suddenly have a huge jump in the number of errors in crawl diagnostics and it all seems to be down to a load of URLs that should be blocked by robots.txt. These have never appeared before, how do I remove them or stop them appearing again?
Moz Pro | | SimonBond0 -
Crawl Diagnostics shows two title and meta tag errors but they are false positives.
I got one hit each on "Missing Meta Description Tag" and "Title Missing or Empty" but in the source of my page they are clearly there: <title>Protein Powder | Compare and Get the Best Prices</title> <meta name="keywords" content="protein powder, whey protein, protein supplement, whey protein isolate, hydrolyzed whey" /> I understand there are conventions which may or may not be followed by Drupal (I read an earlier question where ordering and W3C conventions were suggested) but i'm not sure how to fix them given Drupal will just overwrite any hand editing the next time something is built and importantly, I can't get the crawl to work on cue - it works on the automatic once a week crawl in the main campaign summary but every time I've specifically used the Crawl Test tool it gives me a "There was an error submitting your request to the crawler. Please try again later" so I can't really test any changes. Given Google seems to be recognising the title tag - ie showing it in the results - Do I put this down as seomoz just not working? Kind Regards, Brian
Moz Pro | | btrr690 -
Rogerbot Ignoring Robots.txt?
Hi guys, We're trying to block Rogerbot from spending 8000-9000 of our 10000 pages per week for our site crawl on our zillions of PhotoGallery.asp pages. Unfortunately our e-commerce CMS isn't tremendously flexible so the only way we believe we can block rogerbot is in our robots.txt file. Rogerbot keeps crawling all these PhotoGallery.asp pages so it's making our crawl diagnostics really useless. I've contacted the SEOMoz support staff and they claim the problem is on our side. This is the robots.txt we are using: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow:/PhotoGallery.asp Disallow:/pindex.asp Disallow:/help.asp Disallow:/kb.asp Disallow:/ReviewNew.asp User-agent: * Disallow:/cgi-bin/ Disallow:/myaccount.asp Disallow:/WishList.asp Disallow:/CFreeDiamondSearch.asp Disallow:/DiamondDetails.asp Disallow:/ShoppingCart.asp Disallow:/one-page-checkout.asp Sitemap: http://store.jrdunn.com/sitemap.xml For some reason the Wysiwyg edit is entering extra spaces but those are all single spaced. Any suggestions? The only other thing I thought of to try is to something like "Disallow:/PhotoGallery.asp*" with a wildcard.
Moz Pro | | kellydallen0 -
How does SeoMoz works with noindex meta tags?
In my last SeoMoz Crawl I've found a lot of warnings about duplicated content in page with a noindex meta tag. Is that normal? These pages should not be considered as indexable content of my website, isn't it?
Moz Pro | | jgomes0