To Follow or Not To Follow...... ?
-
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!!!!
-
I hear ya.
Thank you!
-
Its a simple fix, just have to go up the chain of command w/out ruffling feathers..... I am the new guy.
Thank you.
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
Thank you for the responses... kinda what I thought...
-
My thoughts exactly thank you sir!
-
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).
-
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:
-
all pages
-
Just a bit of clarification needed... what pages are marked "noindex, nofollow"? Sometimes NoIndex,NoFollow or NoIndex,Follow can be useful for certain pages.
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
-
Next Steps: Following Fixed On-Page Efforts
A client of mine migrated their website from one platform to another. The site is primarily about lead generation. The individual managing the migration did most of the right things: They thinned out poor content, they set up the appropriate canonical tags and 301 re-directs, the did outreach to quality websites providing inbound links and were able to achieve a reasonable level of URL updates to new URL structure, they cleaned up most of the on-page user experience and on-page keyword items (title tags, meta descriptions, HTML/JS/CSS coding, usage of HTML5 structure for headers/body/footers, etc. During the transition, about a dozen primary keyword phrases lost impression and traffic volume - and most likely conversions. A simple analysis showed that the content and on-page elements in these cases were likely muddled with an unclear strategy. Too many different concepts were co-mingled and thus they lost rank on these relevant terms. Working with the client, we've created a few new pages to separate these important concepts, created nice new content and updated all the on-page elements. We've also altered the 301 redirects and canonicals to better associated backlinks to these divided pages. We've also updated the sitemap and submitted. Okay - all sounds good - now my question is: So what? What happens next? Should I request a fetch from Google? Should I run a campaign / article that discusses each of these concepts separately and then point the readers to these pages to drive some traffic to the new pages associated with those keywords? Is that even necessary? How do I get Google/Bing to recognize the client uncovered and repaired their previous error - and how long should this take? Days? Weeks? Months? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ExploreConsulting0 -
Does the follow link from the moz Profile really count after first with nofollow?
Hey all, I discovered that the link from the public profile might not count. To my knowledge Google "counts" the first link to another page on any given page. The public profile has a nofollow link before your follow link:
On-Page Optimization | | Sebes
linktodomain.tld linktodomain.tld Doesn't this invalidates all the public profile links? What is your stance on this? Regards Sebastian2 -
Should links on a family bar be no follows?
I have a network of sites that we use a family bar for to get the user to where they want to go but as I am looking at my link profile, i keep on seeing these links everywhere. (DUH, of course) Question is, should these links be no follow? Could these links hurt me?
On-Page Optimization | | SBRMarketing0 -
No followed links, what happens to the PR?
Hi, I have read a few times, on here and other places that when a website applies a no follow tag to a link the PR is not retained but instead disappears (evaporates) thus neither website benefiting. Is that true? If so what is the actual benefit of no following a link?
On-Page Optimization | | Bondara0 -
Follow or nofollow the social links?
I recently seen a site that has delibrately no followed the links to there social sites. The company's Google Plus, Facebook and twitter icons all no followed? I would have thought you would want google to know about these profiles? Whats everyone elses take on this?? shivun
On-Page Optimization | | seohive-2227200 -
How do you optimize for keyword phrases that don't follow natural speech patters?
For instance, We have a phase "solar panels for home" that sends decent traffic to our site, but I'm sure we could be capturing more if any of our content was optimized better for it. But how do you optimize for a phrase that makes you sound like a robot if you use it verbatim?
On-Page Optimization | | wreevesc0 -
Dropped 12 after following SEOMOZ Tips
I changed up my on page stuff via SEOMOZ tips, and I dropped like a rock in water 12 positions from 29 to 41 over night for homes for sale in casa Grande AZ. What did I majorly do wrong?
On-Page Optimization | | sansonj0 -
Should I put a No follow on each link in a Javascript dropdown menu?
I have a javascript dropdown menu on every page of my site. It lists all the wineries I write about and sell. About 300 links. I've been told that google doesn't like so many links on a page, but that it doesn't spider javascrpt. Then I hear that it does. Am I being penalized by all the links? Or does the spider really not see them? I don't want to give up my javascript menus, unless I have to. Should I put a no follow on each link inside the code? And on the other hand, am I losing google juice by not letting it see all the pages on my site that I link to in the javascript menu? Thanks in advance for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | JeanYates0