Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
-
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
-
In the situation outline by the OP, these pages are noindexed. There’s no value to clutterig up crawl reports on these pages. Block rogerbot from non-critical parts of your site, unless you want to be alerted of issues, then don’t.
-
Thanks, I'm not concerned about the crawl depth of the search engine bots, there is nothing in your fix that would affect that, I'm curious of the decrease in crawl depth of the site with the Moz as we use that to spot issues with the site.
One of the clients I implemented the fix on went from 4.6K crawled pages to 3.4K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.2K pages.
The other client went from 5K to 3.7K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.3K pages.
TL;DR - Good News everybody, the robots.txt fix didn't reduce the crawl depth of the moz crawler!
-
I agree, unfortunately Moz doesn't have an internal disallow feature that gives you the option to feed them info on where rogerbot can and can't go. I haven't come across any issues with this approach, crawl depth by search engine bots will not be affected since the user-agent is specified.
-
Thanks for the solution! We have been coming across a similar issue with some of our sites and I although I'm not a big fan of this type of workaround, I don't see any other options and we want to focus on the real issues. You don't want to ignore the rule in case other pages that should be indexed are marked noindex by mistake.
Logan, are you still getting the depth of crawls after making this type of fix? Have any other issues arisen from this approach?
Let us know
- topic:timeago_earlier,5 months
-
Hi Nichole,
You're correct in noindexing these pages, they serve little to no value from an SEO perspective. Moz is always going to alert you of noindex tags when they find them since it's such a critical issue if that tag shows up in unexpected places. If you want to remove these issues from your crawl report, add the following directive to your robots.txt file, this will prevent Moz from crawling these URLs and therefore reporting on them:
User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/*edit - do not prevent all user-agents from crawling these URLs, as it will prevent search engines from seeing your noindex tag, they can't obey what they aren't permitted to see. If you want, once all tag & category pages have been removed from the index, you can update your robots.txt to remove the rogerbot directive and add the disallows for tag & category to the * user agent.
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
-
Pages with Duplicate Content Error
Hello, the result of renewed content appeared in the scan results in my Shopify Store. But these products are unique. Why am I getting this error? Can anyone please help to explain why? screenshot-analytics.moz.com-2021.10.28-19_53_09.png
Moz Pro | Apr 15, 2024, 8:32 AM | gokimedia0 -
How crucial are H1 tags and descriptions in wordpress categories?
Hi all Trying to improve SEO for my (mostly) local site, www.nectarbridge.com, and recently got back on Moz Pro account. First crawl of my site by Moz, a manageable number of issues that I've mostly sorted, but the category with the largest number of problems is missing or invalid tags. My content pages and blog posts are not missing the tags. It's category, archives, etc., including multiple pages, ex: https://www.nectarbridge.com/category/blog/page/4/ A smaller number of pages are being flagged by Moz as missing descriptions, and they are also category pages and the like. So the question is - how hard should I pursue fixing these issues? I'm using the divi theme, which apparently doesn't display the category description by default (if it did, that would kill two birds with one stone). There is a fix to add the category description, but before I get into that I'm trying to discern whether this issue really matters greatly to SEO or if I should spend that time just working on more content.
Moz Pro | Jun 24, 2024, 11:19 AM | gary_nectarbridge0 -
Ive been using moz for just a minute now , i used it to check my website and find quite a number of errors , unfortunately i use a wordpress website and even with the tips , is till dont know how to fix the issues.
ive seen quite a number of errors on my website hipmack.co a wordpress website and i dont know how to begin clearing the index errors or any others for that matter , can you help me please? ghg-1.jpg
Moz Pro | Dec 7, 2017, 11:20 PM | Dogara0 -
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
Moz Pro | Jul 21, 2015, 11:43 AM | Blacktie
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0 -
How to find missing or incorrect title tags with a site hosting lots of pages.
i have a website that features more than 9,000 pages. i'm trying to figure out which ones have missing or incorrect title tags. Should I start with screaming frog??
Moz Pro | Jul 2, 2015, 11:09 AM | SapphireCo0 -
Need help understanding search filter URL's and meta tags
Good afternoon Mozzers, One of our clients is a real estate agent and on that site there is a search field that will allow a person to search by filtered categories. Currently, the URL structure makes a new URL for each filter option and in my Moz reports I get the report that there is missing meta data. However, the page is the same the filter options are different so I am at a loss as to how to proper tag our site to optimize those URL's. Can I rel canonical the URL's or alt rel them? I have been looking for a solution for a few days now and like I said I am at a loss of how to properly resolve these warning messages, or if I should even be concerned with the warning messages from Moz (obviously I should be concerned, they are warning messages for a reason). Thank you for your assistance in advance!
Moz Pro | Mar 14, 2014, 1:38 PM | Highline_Ideas0 -
Moz & Xenu Link Sleuth unable to crawl a website (403 error)
It could be that I am missing something really obvious however we are getting the following error when we try to use the Moz tool on a client website. (I have read through a few posts on 403 errors but none that appear to be the same problem as this) Moz Result Title 403 : Error Meta Description 403 Forbidden Meta Robots_Not present/empty_ Meta Refresh_Not present/empty_ Xenu Link Sleuth Result Broken links, ordered by link: error code: 403 (forbidden request), linked from page(s): Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | Aug 22, 2013, 4:38 PM | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Domain / Page Authority - logarithmic
SEOmoz says their Domain / Page Authority is logarithmic, meaning that lower rankings are easier to get, higher rankings harder to get. Makes sense. But does anyone know what logarithmic equation they use? I'm using the domain and page authority as one metric in amongst other metrics in my keyword analysis. I can't have some metrics linear, others exponential and the SEOmoz one logarithmic.
Moz Pro | Feb 11, 2016, 4:43 PM | eatyourveggies0
