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 tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident
-
Hi,
3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google.
I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy".
So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards?
Thanks,
Sven
-
I uploaded the sitemap, let's hope in a few days everything will be normal again and that I'll will regain my PR1 keyword.
Thanks John, and Ryan for your correction!
-
Reconsideration requests are for when Google removes a site from it's index for spam or other reasons. There would not be any reason to use one in this instance.
First and foremost, fix the setting. Then verify the noindex tag is removed by visiting a few of your site's pages. Right-click, choose View Page Source and ensure the tag is gone.
Next, as John suggested create a fresh site map and submit it to Google. Log into Google WMT to ensure they have received the updated map. Since this is a new site and you seem anxious to fix this issue, take a moment and check your robots.txt file from Google WMT to ensure there are not any issues.
If your site is large, it may take time for all your pages to re-appear. If your site is small, you will see results faster.
If there is any 1 or 2 articles you feel are critically important to be indexed fast, then I would suggest tweeting a link for the page to help increase it's visibility to Google. I have no knowledge of this working but I even heard of a person tweeting a link to their site map to get indexed faster. I have no idea if it worked but I love the creativity.
Good luck.
-
Do you have a Google account with Webmaster Tools? If not, go ahead and sign up for one (it's free!) then submit your site for reconsideration to Google. While you're at it, make sure your XML site map is working. You should be back on Google within a few days to a week.
It sounds like this is a short-term nofollow situation, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
-John
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
-
"Noindex, follow" for thin pages?
Hey there Mozzers, I have a question regarding Thin pages. Unfortunately, we have Thin pages, almost empty to be honest. I have the idea to ask the dev team to do "noindex, follow" on these pages. What do you think? Has someone faced this situation before? Will appreciate your input!
Technical SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
"5XX (Server Error)" - How can I fix this?
Hey Mozers! Moz Crawl tells me I am having an issue with my Wordpress category - it is returning a 5XX error and i'm not sure why? Can anyone help me determine the issue? Crawl Issues and Notices for: http://www.refusedcarfinance.com/news/category/news We found 1 crawler issue(s) for this page. High Priority Issues 1 5XX (Server Error) 5XX errors (e.g., a 503 Service Unavailable error) are shown when a valid request was made by the client, but the server failed to complete the request. This can indicate a problem with the server, and should be investigated and fixed.
Technical SEO | | RocketStats0 -
How do I "undo" or remove a Google Search Console change of address?
I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
Link rel="prev" AND canonical
Hi guys, When you have several tabs on your website with products, you can most likely navigate to page 2, 3, 4 etc...
Technical SEO | | AdenaSEO
You can add the link rel="prev" and link rel="next" tags to make sure that 1 page get's indexed / ranked by Google. am I correct? However this still means that all the pages can get indexed, right? For example a webshop makes use of the link rel="prev" and ="next" tags. In the Google results page though, all the seperate tabs pages are still visible/indexed..
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=1
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=24
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=19
etc..... Can we prevent this, and make sure only the main page get's indexed and ranked, by adding a canonical link on every 'tab page' to the main page --> www.domain.nl/watches/ I hope I explained it well and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Regards, Tom1 -
Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
Technical SEO | | jmueller
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None? Thanks a lot,
Jan0 -
How is a dash or "-" handled by Google search?
I am targeting the keyword AK-47 and it the variants in search (AK47, AK-47, AK 47) . How should I handle on page SEO? Right now I have AK47 and AK-47 incorporated. So my questions is really do I need to account for the space or is Google handling a dash as a space? At a quick glance of the top 10 it seems the dash is handled as a space, but I just wanted to get a conformation from people much smarter then I at seomoz. Thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | idiHost0 -
Img before or after h1 tag?
I like images to align right at top of content page. img tag before h1 tag looks better on page, but wondering if h1 tag before img tag is preferred by spider. Irrelevant? or possibly matters? thanks for any thoughts.
Technical SEO | | jotham2
All about Stuff or All about Stuff or even
All about Stuff0 -
What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?
For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name. I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client. I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0