To Follow or Not To Follow...... ?

[APICDA]

So, Im working in house with a large company.  They have a number of sites which are in need of content up dates etc.  In looking around, I noticed

meta name = 'robots'content='noindex,nofollow'

The IT person here who has influence as to what is or is not done; says it should stay that way.

It is my understanding and please correct me if I am wrong..... we generally would like pages followed and indexed.

I'm pretty sure by optimizing on page and making this change it could help the site.....

Thanks for your consideration!!!!

[APICDA]

I hear ya.

Thank you!

[APICDA]

Its a simple fix, just have to go up the chain of command w/out ruffling feathers..... I am the new guy.

Thank you.

[irvingw]

Well it's not really destroyed, that implies a penalty. This is completely reversible.

Just remove the roxots.txt and noindex blocks and the site will come back.

[loopyal]

Congratulations.

You have a client who has successfully destroyed their own ranking in google.

Aleutianadventures.com - Index of

<cite>www.aleutianadventures.com/</cite>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

[APICDA]

[irvingw]

That means the site is entirely blocked. Are you sure the main pages are not being allowed to be indexed? Do a site: search in Google.com to see what is indexed.I would really be surprised if the entire site was intentionally blocked.

If there are main pages indexed he might have intentionally blocked out a large group of low content pages as a response to combating panda. But even in that case they should probably noindex,follow it.

Share the URL and we can take a look.

[APICDA]

Thank you for the responses... kinda what I thought...

[APICDA]

My thoughts exactly thank you sir!

[MikeRoberts]

Mike Davis's answer pretty much hits it on the head. If every page is marked NoIndex,NoFollow then no one will ever find your site unless you specifically direct them to it or they know it exists already... which means you're missing out on a large potential customer base from organic traffic that won't ever be able to find you.

Hell, even those content updates won't matter because the search engines aren't going to care about it (since you told them not to index it) and won't be able to see newer content deeper into the site (since you told it not to follow anything on the page).

[Mike_Davis]

It really depends on what they want.  If your client does not want the search engines to index their site (for whatever reason) than that is correct.  I am at a loss as to why they would do that.  Tell the "IT" guy that no search engine will lists you guys with this tag on every page.  I understand some pages should not be indexed, but an entire site seems counter intuitive. Why would someone want a website if they don't want to be found?  It sounds like someone who thinks they know something when they obviously do not.

Tell them to switch all their tags to:

[APICDA]

all pages

[MikeRoberts]

Just a bit of clarification needed... what pages are marked "noindex, nofollow"? Sometimes NoIndex,NoFollow or NoIndex,Follow can be useful for certain pages.