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NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
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We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages:
However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
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Thanks, appreciate you taking the time to write out a response!
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Thank you for your reply. I will get this information over to the dev team!
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Hi Chris
If Google sees a link to the page it may still list it in its index even though when they got there they saw the noindex tag so they didn't crawl it.
The rational is they see a link from your main site with some anchor text and index the link based on the anchor text they can't crawl it because you say not to, but they still have some information about the page from your anchor text.
Here is a direct Matt Cutts Quote:
"Our highest duty has to be to our users, not to an individual webmaster. When a user does a navigational query and we don’t return the right link because of a NOINDEX tag, it hurts the user experience (plus it looks like a Google issue). If a webmaster really wants to be out of Google without even a single trace, they can use Google’s url removal tool."
REF: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-noindex-behavior/
You can block access to the test site (which is what we do) via htacess (if you're on a Linux Server) and use the Google Index Removal Tool to strip out the currently indexed pages.
I hope that helps.
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If you have nofollow on all the pages, there is a chance it is being caused because google can't follow any links to your pages tho crawl and update them with the no-index tag.
Try changing your links to noindex, follow.
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