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.
Why is our noindex tag not working?
-
Hi,
I have the following page where we've implemented a no index tag. But when we run this page in screaming frog or this tool here to verify the noidex is present and functioning, it shows that it's not.
But if you view the source of the page, the code is present in the head tag. And unfortunately we've seen instances where Google is indexing pages we've noindexed. Any thoughts on the example above or why this is happening in Google?
Eddy
-
Hi Eddy,
Edit: this was already answered before I could post my reply. But I've left the example.
The issue with the meta robots tag is that you are using curly quotation marks around robots and noindex:
You have:
“robots**” content=“noindex”/>
Instead of:
name="robots" content="noindex"**/>This will fix your issue.
Cheers,
David
-
That SF response is from the robots.txt block, not a noindex tag though. SF is also ignoring the incorrectly formatted tag (as it should).
Paul
-
The example page does have a noindex tag in place, but it's not formatted correctly, so it's being ignored. Very subtle issue, but your tag is using "smart quotes" around the elements instead of the plain quotation marks that are required for code. If you look very carefully at the page source code, you'll see that they are quotation marks like you'd see in a Word document; the ones at the beginning of robots and noindex curl a different way than the ones at the end.) This usually occurs when the content was written in a word processor instead of a plain-text editor.
Because the tag's not formatted correctly, it's ignored by both the crawling tools and the search engines.
In addition, the site also has all pages blocked from crawling by the sitewide robots.txt file. This and noindex are conflicting instructions to search engines.
If a page is blocked in robots.txt, then the search engine will not crawl the page and so is not able to discover the noindex tag, even if it were formatted correctly. Therefore if the search engine becomes aware of the page in any other way than straight crawling (and there are a number of ways this can happen), then the page will still get indexed.
If it's a dev site, the proper way to keep it from being indexed is to either noindex all pages, or to put the site behind a password so the search engines and public visitors can't access it. If using noindex, the site must not be blocked with a robots.txt directive.
Does that all make sense?
Paul
-
I ran that page thru screaming frog and it came back with a "blocked by robots" status.
The second tool you suggested is not finding the noindex tag and I don't have an explanation for that, nor am I familiar with the tool.
A site command does not return any results.
Are you sure you have a problem? Is there another example you can provide?
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
-
Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?
I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them? I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSO0 -
H3 Tags - Should I Link to my content Articles- ? And do I have to many H3 tags/ Links as it is ?
Hello All, On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags. I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit or do I have to many tags as it is ?. A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7 I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Does Link Detox Boost Work?
That is a question I am sure many of your have been asking since they launched the product several weeks ago. Cemper claims they helped get a penalty removed in 3 days by using this product. Sounds great doesn't it? Maybe even sounds too good to be true. Well, here is my experience with it. We have been working to get a site's rankings back up for several months now. While it has no penalty, it clearly got hit by the algo change. So we have been very busy creating new content and attempting to remove as much "keyword rich" links as possible. This really hasn't been working very well at all, so when I heard about link detox boost I thought this was the answer to our prayers. The basic idea is link detox boost forces google to crawl your bad links so it know you no longer have links from those sites or have disavowed them. So we ran it and it was NOT cheap. Roughly $300. Now, 3 weeks after running it, the report only shows it has actually crawled 25% of our links, but they assure us it is a reporting issue and the full process has ran its course. The results. No change at all. Some of our rankings are worse, some are better, but nothing worth mentioning. Many products from Link Research Tools are very good, but i'm afraid this isn't one of them. Anyone else use this product? What were your results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper2 -
Canonical tag - but Title and Description are slightly different
I am building a new SEO site with a "Silo" / Themed architecture. I have a travel website selling hotel reservations. I list a hotel page under a city page - example, www.abc.com/Dallas/Hilton.html Then I use that same property under a segment within the city - example www.abc.com/Dallas/Downtown/Hilton.html, so there are two URLs with the same content Both pages are identical, except I want to customize the Title and Description. I want to customize the title and description to build a consistent theme - for example the /Downtown/Hilton page will have the words "Near Downtown" in the Title and Description, while the primary city Hilton page will not. So I have two questions about this. First, is it okay to use a canonical tag if the Title and Description are slightly different? Everything else is identical. If so, will Google crawl and comprehend the unique Title and Description on the "Downtown" silo? I want Google to see that I have several "supporting" pages to my main landing page(s). I want to present to Google 5 supporting pages in each silo that each has a supporting keyword theme. But I'm not sure if Google will consider content of pages that point to a different page using the canonical tag. Please see this supporting example: http://d.pr/i/aQPv Thanks for your insights. Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf0 -
Using href lang tag for multi-regional targeting on the same page
Hi, I have the site au.example.com and I ranked on google AustraliaI would like to be ranked also in Google New Zeland for the same page (au.example.com) Because they are geographically & culturally close Can I place href lang tag for both countries and present the same page The code should look like: OR should i have create a different page for New Zealand (for eample: http://au.example.com/EN-NZ) And the code will look like: What will work better or there is other solution? Hope I’m clear.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda0 -
NoIndexing Massive Pages all at once: Good or bad?
If you have a site with a few thousand high quality and authoritative pages, and tens of thousands with search results and tags pages with thin content, and noindex,follow the thin content pages all at once, will google see this is a good or bad thing? I am only trying to do what Google guidelines suggest, but since I have so many pages index on my site, will throwing the noindex tag on ~80% of thin content pages negatively impact my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640