NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW Mistake
-
One of our top organic landing page was set as "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" by "mistake". I took me about a week to realize this after I saw a drop of traffic on that page. I looked on Google to see if it was indexed and my fear were confirmed!
After finding our that it was switched to "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" I switched it back to "INDEX,FOLLOW" and did an index request in our Google Search Console.
Anyone else has run into a similar issue? Did you ever got the page inxed again?
-
Very happy to hear this!
-
For future reference.
My page was back indexed in Google 3 days after it was taken out and that I sent the re-index request.
This was a lot less bad than I thought it would be!
-
Yes, Google should automatically re-index and re-follow your page over the next few weeks in my experience. A way to speed the process up is to use the "Fetch and Render" tool in Google Search Console and then click "Request to Index".
Here is Googe's Guide for Using the "Fetch as Google" capability their Google Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en
-
I'm really sorry for what happened! I recently had an employee who made such a mistake but at domain level We are monitoring our websites rankings and it fell from a visibility percentage of 21 to 4! Chaotic. After one month from correcting the problem, we only have a 10 visibility percentage. So, I think you might have to wait a bit until full recovery. However, please bear in mind that my team didn't notice the problem for one month since we did not have an optimization subscription for the client. Also, the domain did not have many linking pages to it and not a high authority. As such, I hope your page will recover much faster than the scenario I am talking about. Good luck!
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
-
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Is there an advantage to using rel=canonical rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?
Is there an advantage to using link rel=alternate (as recommended by Google) rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)? The content on the mobile pages is very similar to the content on the desktop site. I see Google recommends canonical and alternate tags, but what are the benefits of using those rather than noindex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
To nofollow or follow internal links, that is the question...
"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff. I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what? Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages. Thanks! Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
If linking to contextual sites is beneficial for SE rankings, what impact does the re=“nofollow” attribute have when applied to these outbound contextual links?
Communities, opinion-formers, even Google representatives, seem to offer a consensus that linking to quality, relevant sites is good practice and therefore beneficial for SEO. Does this still apply when the outbound links are "nofollow"? Is there any good research on this out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielpressley0 -
Fix broken external links on noindex, follow pages no one visits?
Would you take the time to fix external links on your site on pages that are noindex, follow on pages that no one ever visits? The only reason to do it would be to present a tidier site to Google, but would it really care if those pages are noindex/folllow? The thing that makes it a non-trivial amount of work is that there are hundreds of these on a large site. Do you think Google cares, if they're noindex/follow? I know the safe answer is always fix everything, but really it has to get weighed against the likely benefit and other projects with a limited amount of time to work with. Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Indexing of internal search results: canonicalization or noindex?
Hi Mozzers, First time poster here, enjoying the site and the tools very much. I'm doing SEO for a fairly big ecommerce brand and an issue regarding internal search results has come up. www.example.com/electronics/iphone/5s/ gives an overview of the the model-specific listings. For certain models there are also color listings, but these are not incorporated in the URL structure. Here's what Rand has to say in Inbound Marketing & SEO: Insights From The Moz Blog Search filters are used to narrow an internal search—it could be price, color, features, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClassicDriver
Filters are very common on e-commerce sites that sell a wide variety of products. Search filter
URLs look a lot like search sorts, in many cases:
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop?price=1000
The solution here is similar to the preceding one—don’t index the filters. As long as Google
has a clear path to products, indexing every variant usually causes more harm than good. I believe using a noindex tag is meant here. Let's say you want to point users to an overview of listings for black 5s iphones. The URL is an internal search filter which looks as follows: www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5s?search=black Which you wish to link with the anchor text "black iphone 5s". Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you no-index the black 5s search filters, you lose the equity passed through the link. Whereas if you canonicalize /electronics/apple/iphone/5s you would still leverage the link juice and help you rank for "black iphone 5s". Doesn't it then make more sense to use canonicalization?0 -
Nofollow links in Google Webmaster
I've noticed nofollow links showing up in my Google Webmaster tools "links to your site" list. If they are nofollow why are they showing up here? Do nofollow links still count as a backlink and transfer PR and authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoCoGuru1