Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?

[madcow78]

Hi guys,

I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing:

if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at  the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it?

Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either.

Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page.

so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain?

Cheers,

Pierpaolo

[BruceA]

Hi

This is a really interesting article by Matt Cutts

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

I think this will help you to clarify your concerns on syntax etc

Bruce

[madcow78]

Bruce, to be honest I have started thinking it's due to a syntax error, as - although I wasn't able to find something to confirm it - I suppose the right syntax is "nofollow, noindex", that site's tag is "NO FOLLOW, NO INDEX".   So Google reads that tag like "follow, index" or directly discards it.

I'd like to understand if "no-follow, no-index" works, instead.

Finally, if I'm right, do you think it's an error, a CMS's glitch or something done on purpose?

I don't think it's due to WM site preferences, as a CMS usually makes all the alternative versions equals therefore that tag should be live on every possible alternative site, parked domain included.

Pierpaolo

[BruceA]

Could it be that the domain WM has not set their site preferences in GWT and therefore Google are crawling alternative version?

w w w . mountview . org and mountview . org need to have their preferences set equaly in GWT for Both domain versions or Google with see them as two different sites.

Bruce