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
-
Follow/NoFollow?
I run Magento 2 and have two stores, one intended for the EU and one for the US. 99% of the products available appear on both stores, there is an automatic redirect in place to either store depending on your location. But I think Google is seeing these as duplicate products/stores. Should I add the Index,NoFollow tag to one of the two stores? My issue is that I want both stores to rank in their geographical locations and I am concerned that by adding the NoFollow tag is will stop that dead in its tracks for one location. Any advice would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots2 -
Should I better noindex 'scripted' files in our portfolio?
Hello Moz community, As a means of a portfolio, we upload these PowerPoint exports – which are converted into HTML5 to maintain interactivity and animations. Works pretty nicely! We link to these exported files from our products pages. (We are a presentation design company, so they're pretty relevant). For example: https://www.bentopresentaties.nl/wp-content/portfolio/ecar/index.html However, they keep coming up in the Crawl warnings, as the exported HTML-file doesn't contain text (just code), so we get errors in: thin content no H1 missing meta description missing canonical tag I could manually add the last two, but the first warnings are just unsolvable. Therefore I figured we probably better noindex all these files… They appear to don't contain any searchable content and even then; the content of our clients work is not relevant for our search terms etc. They're mere examples, just in the form of HTML files. Am I missing something or should I better noindex these/such files? (And if so: is there a way to include a whole directory to noindex automatically, so I don't have to manually 'fix' all the HTML exports with a noindex tag in the future? I read that using disallow in robots.txt wouldn't work, as we will still link to these files as portfolio examples).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BentoPres0 -
ECommerce search results to noindex?
Hi, To avoid duplicated content and the possibility of thousands additional pages to an ecommerce website would it be a reasonable solution to have the page as a no-index, would this benefit the site? Thanks **Lantec **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lantec0 -
Should we NOINDEX NOFOLLOW canonical pages?
Hi, I was window shopping at Gemvara and noticed something interesting... They rank very high for long-tail phrases such as "rose gold engagement rings" and in their pagination pages for that category not only they filled canonical to the main category page (which is logic) but also they "NOINDEX NOFOLLOW" the pages... Is that recommended? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Meta NOINDEX... how long before Google drops dupe pages?
Hi, I have a lot of near dupe content caused by URL params - so I have applied: How long will it take for this to take effect? It's been over a week now, I have done some removal with GWT removal tool, but still no major indexed pages dropped. Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Duplicate on page content - Product descriptions - Should I Meta NOINDEX?
Hi, Our e-commerce store has a lot of product descriptions duplicated - Some of them are default manufacturer descriptions, some are descriptions because the colour of the product varies - so essentially the same product, just different colour. It is going to take a lot of man hours to get the unique content in place - would a Meta No INDEX on the dupe pages be ok for the moment and then I can lift that once we have unique content in place? I can't 301 or canonicalize these pages, as they are actually individual products in their own right, just dupe descriptions. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
Why should I add URL parameters where Meta Robots NOINDEX available?
Today, I have checked Bing webmaster tools and come to know about Ignore URL parameters. Bing webmaster tools shows me certain parameters for URLs where I have added META Robots with NOINDEX FOLLOW syntax. I can see canopy_search_fabric parameter in suggested section. It's due to following kind or URLs. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1728 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1729 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1730 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=2239 But, I have added META Robots NOINDEX Follow to disallow crawling. So, why should it happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
How can I check if the FOLLOW,NOINDEX tag is working?
Hi everyone! After reading about pagination practices, a few days ago we introduced the <meta name="robots" content="FOLLOW,NOINDEX" /> tag, to prevent duplicate content. You can find an example below: http://www.inmonova.com/en/properties?page=2 I have been checking yahoo site explorer and result pages still get indexed. My question is: Am I doing something wrong? Is the code incorrect (follow,noindex - noindex,follow)? Or does it just take some time to have effect? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inmonova0