Is Googlebot ignoring directives? Or is it Me?
-
I saw an answer to a question in this forum a few days ago, that said it was a bad idea to use robots.txt to tell googlebot to go away.
That SEO said it was much better to use the META tag to say noindex,nofollow.
So I removed the robots directive and added the META tag
<meta robots='noindex,nofollow'>
Today, I see google showing my send to a friend page where I expected the real page to be.
Does it mean Google is stupid?
Does it mean google ignores the Robots META tag?
Does it mean short pages have more value than long pages?
Does it mean if I convert my whole site to snippets, I'll get more traffic?
Does it mean garbage trumps content?
I have more questions, but this is more than enough.
-
Thank you Ryan.
They completely ignored the meta tags., completely messing up our serps. So I put it back in robots. I wont trust google again to do the right thing.
-
Hi Allan,
It is a best practice to use meta tags to indicate your indexing preference to search engines.
Normally the recommended implementation would be "noindex, follow" but without examining your site it is impossible to know for sure.
Google honors meta tags but there are a number of issues which could be the source of your issue. For example, if you did not use valid syntax the tag may not be honored. If you are blocking the page in robots.txt, then search engines cannot read the tag.
As for the last three questions, the simple answer is quality content is best.
If you can share the URL of the page involved, we can offer a specific response to the implementation of the meta tag.
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
-
301 Re-directing 'empty' domains
Hello, My client had purchased a few domains and 301 re-directed them, pointing to our main website. As far as I am aware the 'empty domains' are brand related but no content has ever been displayed on them, and I doubt they have much authority. The issue here is that we took a dive in ranking for our main keyword, I had a look on ahrefs and found the below: | www.empty-domain/our-keyword | 30 | 19 | 1 | fb 0
Technical SEO | | SO_UK
G+ 0
in 4 | REDIRECT 301 TO www.main-domain/our-keyword | 8 Feb '175 d | The ranking dip happened at the same time as the re-direct was re-discovered / re-crawled. Could the 'empty' URL in question been causing us any issues? I understand that this is terrible practice for 301 redirects, I was hoping someone in the community could shed light on any possible solution for this.0 -
Please let me know if I am in a right direction with fixing rel="canonical" issue?
While doing my website crawl, I keep getting the message that I have tons of duplicated pages.
Technical SEO | | kirupa
http://example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php are considered to be the duplicates. As I figured out this one: http://example.com/index.php is a canonical page, and I should point out this one: http://www.example.com/index.php to it. Could you please let me know if I will do a right thing if I put this piece of code into my index.php file?
? Or I should use this one:0 -
Weird Blog tags and re-directs
Hello fellow Digital Marketeers! As an in-house kinda guy, I rarely get to audit sites other than my own. But, I was tasked with auditing another. So I ran it through Screaming Frog and the usual tools. I got a couple of URLs come back with timeout messages, so I checked them manually- they're apparently part of a blog's archive: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/tag/training-2/ I click 'read more' and it takes you to: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/pfi-contracts-3-myth-busters-to-help-achieve-savings/ The first URL seems entirely redundant. Has anyone else seen something like this? Just an explanation as to why something like that would exist, and how you'd handle that would be grand! Much appreciated, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Best way to redirect friendly URL in direct mail ?
Hi, When we do direct mail to our customers talking about a specific product we sell we usually put a link in the letter so the customer can go directly to the product just by typing a short link, something like:
Technical SEO | | BigJoe
www.example.com/blue-widget This link will then re-direct to:
www.example.com/shop/product/brand-name-big-blue-widget-with-green-ends-200m-50diameter.php Which we are happy with at the moment but I want to check we are doing it correctly in terms of redirects, we currently re-direct it using .htaccess like:
Redirect /blue-widget http://www.example.com/shop/product/brand-name-big-blue-widget-with-green-ends-200m-50diameter.php This re-directs it as a 302 but should it be done as a 301 ? I am not sure why we did 302's to start with but I am thinking they should be 301's, I think it might have been because the URL we were redirecting from was imaginary ? Also should we use the Redirect line in the .htaccess or should we do each one with a RewriteRule ? Thanks BigJoe0 -
Direct link vs 302 redirect
So we have recently relaunched a site that we manage. As part of this we have changed the domain. The webdesign agency that built the new site have implemented a direct link from the old domain to the new domain. What is best practice a direct link or a 302 redirect? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
404 and re directs from an old design to a new one
I have a directory that I am redesigning. Currently, the old directory is all 404 pages. I need to use the URL's in the old directory for the new one. Should I redirect all the old pages to the new pages? Or is it better to delete the old pages, let them de index - so that I can use those same URLs? I really need help with this.
Technical SEO | | SwanJob0 -
Custom Permalinks (aka alias') - does it look spammy to googlebot?
I am moving my whole site over to wordpress (150+pgs). In the process I assigned pages to appropriate parent pages via "page attributes". I was really excited about this. I like how it organizes everything in the pages dashboard. I also think that the sitemap that comes with my theme can create something really great for visitors with this info. What I realized after doing that is that it changed my url to include the parent page. Basically, the url is now "domain.com/parent-page/child-page.html". This is rather disasterous because the url's of these newly created child pages on my old site are simple "domain.com/child-page". Not that they're defined as parent or child pages on my existing dreamweaver/html site... but you know what I mean - Right?! I got a plugin called "Permalink Editor" to let me customize the url. So, I went through all of the child pages and got rid of the parent page in the url. Then when I woke up this morning I realized that what I've created is a "permalink alias". That sounds a little bit scary to me. Perhaps like google could consider it spam and like I'm trying to "sculpt link flow". I'm not... I'm just trying to recreate my site as it is in wordpress. I want the site to be exactly the same in terms of the url's. But, I want the many benefit's of wordpress' CMS. Should I go an unassign all of the parent/child pages in the "Page Attributes". Or, am I being paranoid and should I leave it as is? fyi - this is the first page that came up with I searched for permalink alias. It looks kind of black-hatty to me?!
Technical SEO | | nsjadmin
- http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/wordpress-seo/seo-ultimate-4-7/ Thanks so much. I look forward to a response!0 -
Why is google ignoring my sitelinks demotions?
I'm referring to the sitelinks that appear in the SERPs when searching for my brand name. 6 subpages come up- some found in my main navigation, some not. 3 of the 6 sitelinks have been demoted in Webmaster Tools under "Site Configuration > Sitelinks." I realize that they say in their instructions: "Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but we do consider a demotion a strong hint that we'll try to honor when generating sitelinks." I am just surprised they would ignore 3 of the demotions and for so long. The pages that are demoted do not have very many internal links pointing to them (unlike other pages of my site that are targeted specifically). Also, the site has tens of thousands of pages to choose from. Why are they ignoring my request? What else can I do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0