Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
-
Hi all,
I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions
We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS!
Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination).
After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt"So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt.
So coming to my question.
-
Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index?
-
Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index?
I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”.I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index.
Thanks!
B
-
-
There's no real way to estimate how long the re-crawl will take, Ben. You can get a bit of an idea by looking at the crawl rate reported in Google Webmaster Tools.
Yes, asking for a page fetch then submitting with linked pages for each of the main website sections can help speed up the crawl discovery. In addition, make sure you've submitted a current sitemap and it's getting found correctly (also reported in GWT) You should also do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools. Too many sites forget about optimizing for Bing - even if it's only 20% of Google's traffic, there's no point throwing it away.
Lastly, earning some new links to different sections of the site is another great signal. This can often be effectively & quickly done using social media - especially Google+ as it gets crawled very quickly.
As far as your other question - yes, once you get the unwanted URLs out of the index, you can add the robots.txt disallow back in to optimise your crawl budget. I would strongly recommend you leave the meta-robots no-index tag in place though as a "belt & suspenders" approach to keep pages linking into those unwanted pages from triggering a re-indexing. It's OK to have both in place as long as the de-indexing has already been accomplished, as we've discussed.
Hope that answer your questions?
Paul
-
So once Google has started to see the meta-noindex and is slowly deindexing pages, once that is done, I would like to block it from crawling them with a robots.txt to conserve my crawl budget.
But, there are still internal links on the site that point to these URL´s - would they get back into the index in this case?
-
Hi Paul,
Thank you for your detailed answer - so I'm not going crazy
I did try with canonicals but then realized they are more of a suggestion as opposed to a directive and I am still correcting a lot of dupe content and 404's so I am imagining that Google view's the site as "these guys don't know what they are doing' so may have ignored the canonical suggestion.
So what I have done is remove the robots block on the pages I want de-indexed and add in meta noindex, follow on these pages - From what you are saying, they should naturally de-index, after which, I will put the robots.txt block back on to keep my crawl budget spent on better areas of the site.
How long in your opinion can it take for Googlebot to de-index the pages? Can I help it along at all to speed up? Fetch page and linking pages as Googlebot?
Thanks again,
Ben
-
You're right to be confused, B. The terminology is unfortunate and misleading.
To answer your questions
1. Yes
2. Yes.
A disallow in robots.txt does nothing to remove already-indexed pages. That's not its purpose. Its only purpose is to tell the search crawlers not to waste their time crawling those pages. Even if pages have been blocked in robots, they will remain in the index if already there. Even if never crawled, and blocked in robots.txt, they can still end up indexed if some other indexed page links to them and the crawlers find those pages by following links. Again, nothing in a robots.txt disallow tells the engines to remove a page from the index, just not to waste time crawling it.
Put another way, the robots.txt disallow directive only disallows crawling - it says nothing about what to do if the page gets into the index in other ways.
The meta-robots no-index tag however explicitly states to the crawler "if you arrive at this page, do not add it to the index. If it is already in the index, remove it".
And yea - as you suspected - if pages are blocked in robots.txt, the crawler obeys and doesn't visit those pages So it can't discover the no-index command to drop them from the index. Thus the only way a page could get dropped is if a crawler followed a link from an external site and discovered the page that way. A very inefficient way of trying to get all those pages out of the index.
Bottom line - robots.txt is never the correct tool to deal with duplicate content issues. It's sole purpose is to keep the crawlers from wasting time on unimportant pages so they can spend more time finding (and therefore indexing) more important pages.
The three tools for dealing with duplicate content are meta-robots no-index tags in a page header, 301 redirects, and canonical tags. Which one to use depends on the architecture of your site, your intended purpose, and the site's technical limitations.
Hope that makes sense?
Paul
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
-
Translating meta tags using WPML and AIO SEO
Having a heck of a time finding info on this one... We're working on a multilingual website which uses WPML. I've used the All in One SEO plugin to customize meta data (title, description, etc). These strings do not appear in the list of translations in WPML. Does anyone have any experience with this setup? How do you enable WPML to translate meta data set via the AIO plugin? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc0 -
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Meta Robot Tag:Index, Follow, Noodp, Noydir
When should "Noodp" and "Noydir" meta robot tag be used? I have hundreds or URLs for real estate listings on my site that simply use "Index", Follow" without using Noodp and Noydir. Should the listing pages use these Noodp and Noydr also? All major landing pages use Index, Follow, Noodp, Noydir. Is this the best setting in terms of ranking and SEO. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?
Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Does a UTM tag influence the linkvalue?
Will Google value a link with a UTM tag the same as a clean link without a UTM tag? I should say that a UTM tag link is not a natural link so the linkvalue is zero. Anyone any idea how to look at this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
Should you include domain / brand in Meta Title
Hello, I am trying to come up with a strategy for creating meta title information for my eCommerce store. I have read mixed reviews on the examples below. The first includes the company / brand in the meta title and thus is included in SE results. The second does not. Probably not a 'right' answer here so I look forward to answers with rationale... also open to a completely difference strategy all together! 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - $Company_Name OR 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - Pre Workout Supplement Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 6thirty0 -
Lowercase VS. Uppercase Canonical tags?
Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag. The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10). The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase. Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions". Is this an issue? Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's? I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Should I remove Meta Keywords tags?
Hi, Do you recommend removing Meta Keywords or is there "nothing to lose" with having them? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0