Noindex, nofollow on a blog since 2009

[vickim]

Just reviewed a WordPress blog that was launched in 2009 but somehow the privacy setting was to not index it, so all this time there's been a noindex, nofollow meta tag in the header. The client couldn't figure out why masses of content wasn't showing up in search results.

I've fixed the setting and assume Google will spider in short order; the blog is a subdirectory of their main site. My question is whether there is anything else I can or should do. Can Google recognize the age of the content, or that it once had a noindex meta tag? Will it "date" the blog as of today? Has the client lost out on untold benefits from the long history of content creation? I imagine that link juice from any backlinks to the blog will now flow back to the main site; think that's true?

Just curious what others might think of this scenario and whether any other action is warranted.

[vickim]

Thanks Dan. One thing I found interesting is that Google Webmaster Tools doesn't offer any alerts about pages that aren't indexed because of meta tags, only about those included in the robots.txt file.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

Great responses Matt and Ben, thanks!!  Only things I could add are;

Webmaster Tools

• Check google webmaster tools every few days for the first 2-3 weeks.
• You may turn up some 404s or other types of errors that should be corrected.
• And keep your eyes out for any other warnings

Analytics

• You're going to spike your traffic (potentially, hopefully) in analytics big time, or at least skew the data
• Use filters and advanced segments to separate blog traffic so you can still analyze things even after a potential spike in blog search traffic.
• At minimum make an annotation of the date you made it indexable.

Dates

• Regarding the dates, I did come across this recently - I have not tested, so please take it with a grain of salt - removing dates from the SERPs - I would only recommend trying it if the content was not "time sensitive" (like a cooking recipe).

Hope all this helps!

-Dan

[vickim]

Thanks for the clarification Ben. I think I'll leave older posts as is. They've been actively posting several times a week, so there should be enough fresh content. My hope is that Google recognizes the age of the blog because it's my understanding that age factors in the ranking algorithm.

[blacey]

Ahh yeah my bad, ignore that bit. I think you'd still want to make a subtle change to each post so WordPress can set the date updated flag on the sitemap to today, that way Google will put a higher priority on the content when indexing your site.

[vickim]

Thanks, the site maps are a good idea. Ben, I'm not sure what you mean about making the content different to what Google has in its index. Because of the meta tag, it doesn't have any content in its index, right?

[Matthew_Edgar]

You've done the most important step (removing the noindex/nofollow) tags. The only additional thing I would do is submit (or resubmit) the XML sitemap to Google. Make sure that XML sitemap is perfect and error free so that you don't create any additional errors.

Google should be smart enough to recognize the dates. I've never had a situation where it was years between publish and index. I have however had situations where it was days or weeks in between publish and index and in those situations Google has recognize the date. I'd imagine the same is true here (assuming of course, you have the date in a recognizable format and don't change the date to today).

I'd be curious to find out what happens. Definitely update this Q&A when you find out what happens!

[blacey]

I would probably re-arrange some of the paragraphs (or add some more content) to the old posts and update them in WordPress, this then makes the content different to what Google has in its index.

I would then use the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin to regenerate your sitemap. Since you've updated and added new content to the posts their last updated date would have changed so Google will probably see this as revised content. I would submit to all major search engines as your first port of call.

In terms of the "link juice", I would say that Google will still count links to the article as a ranking factor, but because you have noindex the content wont appear in search results. So the content will have a fairly good page rank (possibly) but its being held back by the exclusion of the search engine index.

Now that the setting has been changed and the sitemap / content has been updated you should start to see the results in the search results in due time.

You could also add a few new articles of content to the blog and publicise that over social media to help get back in the game a bit quicker.