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.
Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
-
We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace. Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content)
Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done
I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?
-
Hi Gaston
Thank you for the detailed response and suggestions. I will follow up with my findings. Point 3 and 4; - I think there is something there.
James
-
Hi James,
Great that you've checked out those items and there aren't errors.
I'd break my response into bullet points so its easier to respond
1- I'm bugged that the traffic loss occurs in the same month as the https redirection.
That completely tells me that you've either killed, redirected or noindexed some pages that drove a lot of traffic.
2- Also it could be possible that you didn't deserve that much traffic due to either being ranked on searches that you weren't relevant or Google didn't fully understand your site. That often happens when migration takes places, as Google needs to re-calculate and fully understand the new site.3- If you have still on the old HTTP search Console property, I'd check as many (and in some scalable way) keywords as possible, trying to find which have fallen out in rankings.
4- When checking those keywords, compare URLs that were ranked, there could be some changes.5- And lastly, have you made sure that there aren't any indexation and/or Crawlability issues? Check the raw number of indexable URLs and compare it with the number that Search Console shows in the index coverage report.
Best wishes.
GR -
Hi Gaston
Thank you for sharing your insights.
1. I have looked through all the pages and made sure we have not noindexed important pages
2. The migration went well; no double redirects or duplicate content.
3. I looked through Google search console - Fixed all the errors; (mostly complains about 404 error caused by products that are out of stock or from vendors who leave the website)
4. A friend said he thinks our pages are over-optimized - and hence that could be the reason; We went ahead and tweaked all the pages that were driving traffic; but change.
If you have a moment here is our website: www.rebelsmarket.com - If there is anything that standsout please let me know. I appreciate your help
James
-
Hi Joe
We have applied all the redirects carefully and tested them to make sure; we have no duplicate content
The url: www.rebelsmarket.com
Redirect to SSL: March 2018 (we started with the blog and then moved to products page)
We added; noindex and nofollow tags at the sametime;
Thank you
James
-
Hi John
Sorry, I have been tied up with travel schedule. Here is the website www.rebelsmarket.com
Thank you for your help John
-
Hi James,
Yiut issues lie elsewhere - did anything else happen during the update? My first thoughts are that the redirects were incorrectly applied.
- Whats the URL?
- When was the redirect HTTP > HTTPS installed & how?
- When was noindex and nofollow tags added?
You're a month in, so you should be able to recover. Sharing the URL would be useful if you need any further assistance.
-
Hey James - would you be comfortable sharing the URL? I can run some diagnostics on it to see what other issues could be the cause of the drop.
Thanks!
John
-
Hi James,
I'm sorry to hear that you've lost over 45% of your traffic.
Absolutely not, having a lot of noindex and nofollow pages won't affect your rankings and your SEO strength.On the other hand, a traffic drop could be related to many issues, some of them:
- Algorithm changes, there has been a lot of movement this year
- You've noindexed some of your high traffic pages
- Some part of the migration gone wrong
- And the list could be endless.
I'd start checking Search Console, there you could spot which keywords and/or URLs are those that aren't ranking that high.
It might come handy, this sort of tutorial on analyzing a traffic drop: How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer - Moz Blog
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
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 -
Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?
Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiseDE
Lise0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Do Page Anchors Affect SEO?
Hi everyone, I've been researching for the past hour and I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere! Can someone tell me if page anchors affect SEO at all? I have a client that has 9 page anchors on one landing page on their website - which means if you were to scroll through their website, the page is really really long! I always thought that by using page anchors instead of sending users through to a dedicated landing page, ranking for those keywords makes it harder because a search spider will read all the content on that landing page and not know how to rank for individual keywords? Am I wrong? The client in particular sells furniture, so on their landing page they have page anchors that jump the user down to "tables" or "chairs" or "lighting" for example. You can then click on one of the product images listed in that section of the page anchor and go through to an individual product page. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
Why is Google ranking irrelevant / not preferred pages for keywords?
Over the past few months we have been chipping away at duplicate content issues. We know this is our biggest issue and is working against us. However, it is due to this client also owning the competitor site. Therefore, product merchandise and top level categories are highly similar, including a shared server. Our rank is suffering major for this, which we understand. However, as we make changes, and I track and perform test searches, the pages that Google ranks for keywords never seems to match or make sense, at all. For example, I search for "solid scrub tops" and it ranks the "print scrub tops" category. Or the "Men Clearance" page is ranking for keyword "Women Scrub Pants". Or, I will search for a specific brand, and it ranks a completely different brand. Has anyone else seen this behavior with duplicate content issues? Or is it an issue with some other penalty? At this point, our only option is to test something and see what impact it has, but it is difficult to do when keywords do not align with content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
Hi there. I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article ) Thanks 🙂 Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0