Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
-
Hi guys,
I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing:
if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it?
Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either.
Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page.
so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain?
Cheers,
Pierpaolo
-
Hi
This is a really interesting article by Matt Cutts
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
I think this will help you to clarify your concerns on syntax etc
Bruce
-
Bruce, to be honest I have started thinking it's due to a syntax error, as - although I wasn't able to find something to confirm it - I suppose the right syntax is "nofollow, noindex", that site's tag is "NO FOLLOW, NO INDEX". So Google reads that tag like "follow, index" or directly discards it.
I'd like to understand if "no-follow, no-index" works, instead.
Finally, if I'm right, do you think it's an error, a CMS's glitch or something done on purpose?
I don't think it's due to WM site preferences, as a CMS usually makes all the alternative versions equals therefore that tag should be live on every possible alternative site, parked domain included.
Pierpaolo
-
Could it be that the domain WM has not set their site preferences in GWT and therefore Google are crawling alternative version?
w w w . mountview . org and mountview . org need to have their preferences set equaly in GWT for Both domain versions or Google with see them as two different sites.
Bruce
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
-
Google is indexing our old domain
We changed our primary domain from vivitecsolutions.com to vivitec.net. Google is indexing our new domain, but still has our old domain indexed too. The problem is that the old site is timing out because of the https: Thought on how to make the old indexing go away or properly forward the https?
Technical SEO | | AdsposureDev0 -
Google Indexing Pages with Made Up URL
Hi all, Google is indexing a URL on my site that doesn't exist, and never existed in the past. The URL is completely made up. Anyone know why this is happening and more importantly how to get rid of it. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Skip indexing the search pages
Hi, I want all such search pages skipped from indexing www.somesite.com/search/node/ So i have this in robots.txt (Disallow: /search/) Now any posts that start with search are being blocked and in Google i see this message A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. How can i handle this and also how can i find all URL's that Google is blocking from showing Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
Targeting multiple keywords with index page
Quick keyword question.... I just started working with a client that is ranking fairly well for a number of keywords with his index page. Right now he has a bunch of duplicate titles, descriptions, etc across the entire site. There are 5 different keywords in the title of the index page alone. I am wondering if it OK to target 3 different keywords with the index page? Or, if I should cut it down to 1. Think blue widget, red widget, and widget making machines. I want each of the individual keywords to improve but don't want to lose what I have either. Any ideas? THANKS!!!!
Technical SEO | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Killing Page Rank flow
Another SEO has told a friend to nofollow certain internal links i.e. to their own website. There are no hard feelings but this sounds like nonsense to me. Firstly, I'm sure Matt Cutts said that the link juice will not be redistributed amongst the other links (can't find the post - does anyone have the URL or confirmation?). Secondly (and this is obvious) those pages which have links to other pages in the website will have no link juice to pass back, resulting in a lower "total sum" and the inability for that PR to flow back. In short it seems silly. Any thoughts would be interesting to hear.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
Pages not Indexed after a successful Google Fetch
I am trying to understand why google isn't indexing key content on my site. www.BeyondTransition.com is indexed and new pages show up in a couple of hours. My key content is 6 pages of information for each of 3000 events (driven by mySQL on a wordpress platform). These pages are reached via a search page, but no direct navigation from the home page. When I link to an event page from an indexed page it doesn't show up in search results. When I use fetch on webmaster tools the fetch is successful but is then not indexed - or if it does appear in results it's directed to the internal search page e.g. http://www.beyondtransition.com/site/races/course/race110003/ has been fetched and submitted with links but when I search for BeyondTransition Ironman Cozumel I get these results.... So what have I done wrong and how do I go about fixing it? All thoughts and advice appreciated Thanks Denis
Technical SEO | | beyondtransition0