Warnings for blocked by blocked by meta-robots/meta robots Nofollow...how to resolve?

[M80Marketing]

Hello,

I see hundreds of notices for blocked by meta-robots/meta robots nofollow and it appears it is linked to the comments on my site which I assume I would not want to be crawled. Is this the case and these notices are actually a positive thing? Please advise how to clear them up if these notices can be potentially harmful for my SEO.

Thanks,

Talia

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The notices in the SEOmoz PRO platform are just that - notices. They are neither good nor bad in themselves, but we want you to be aware of them in case the issues are not supposed to be there.

In the case of comments such as yours, there are very legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want these crawled or indexed, depending on your situation (duplicate content issues, link to spam, etc) If you are aware why the issues are appearing, and comfortable with your reasoning, it's perfectly fine to have notices in your account.

[smallbox]

If you are talking about Google Webmaster reporting that blog comments are blocked or no-followed, then yes, that is a good thing. Normally, it's a pretty good idea to make sure that any links that are added to blog comments are no-follow.

However, you do want to make sure that you are not blocking the blog post itself from being indexed or crawled. Just double-check the URL that Webmaster is reporting. If it's just for comment links, then your all good. If it's for the whole URL, then you might want to consider modifying your robots.txt file to make sure that your blog page is crawled but comment links are not.