"INDEX,FOLLOW" then later in the code "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" which does google follow?
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background info: we have an established closed E-commerce system which the company has been using for years. I have only just started and reviewing the system, I don't have direct access to the code, but can request changes, but it could take months before the changes are in effect (or done at all), and we won't can't change to a new E-commerce system for the short to mid term.
While reviewing the site (with help of seomoz crawl diagnostics) I noticed that some of the existing "landing pages" have in the code:
<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">INDEX,FOLLOW</a>" /> then a few lines later<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</a>" />
Which the crawl diagnostics flagged up, but in the webmaster tools says
"We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site."so the question is which instructions does google follow? the first or 2nd?
note: clearly this is need fixed, but I have a big list of changes for the system so I need to know how important this is
tthanks
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I've never actually had any errors listed for non-indexable content in the HTML Improvements section of WMT. So I'm not 100% sure what would set off that notification. Though the sites I work on do have a number of pages that are NoIndex and/or NoFollow. So i guess the issue would be caused not by purposefully blocking the page but some other means that makes your page unable to be crawled properly.
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Yeah I did that after posting the question I started test like that, but its not coming up and searching the url does not show the page, but other normal pages ("lower" pages) are showing (that don't have this problem), so it seems that it is de-indexed those pages.
its weird that webmaster tools say ""We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site.", when there are.
Getting this sorted one way or another is my top priority
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If you copy a string of text on the page and paste it into google search, does your page show up in the results? If so, then its being indexed despite the second robots tag. If it doesn't show up, then its not being indexed. So importance would rely on whether you want that page to be indexed and whether or not it is being indexed. Either way, you should look into cleaning that up at some point.
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