Why are "noindex" pages access denied errors in GWT and should I worry about it?

[94501]

GWT calls pages that have "noindex, follow" tags "access denied errors."

How is it an "error" to say, "hey, don't include these in your index, but go ahead and crawl them."

These pages are thin content/duplicate content/overly templated pages I inherited and the noindex, follow tags are an effort to not crap up Google's view of this site.

The reason I ask is that GWT's detection of a rash of these access restricted errors coincides with a drop in organic traffic. Of course, coincidence is not necessarily cause.

Should I worry about it and do something or not?

Thanks... Darcy

[max.favilli]

I am a little surprised, because having those pages as "noindex, follow" should not bring GWT to flag them as errors.

Monica is correct in addressing google flag anything than 200 as errors, but... Your page with "noindex, follow" should return a HTTP code of 200. If it is returning anything else, it's probably wrong, and you should analyze why is doing it.

My religion has a law saying that GWT should return no errors, point. I have also witnessed few times a correlation between lowering GWT errors count to 0 and an improve in SERP ranking; but I have no proof one is causing the other.

[HashtagHustler]

I had a similar issue where my sitemap and my robots.txt didn't match properly and they were causing a slew of errors to show up. Everything falls under a crawler error but "should" clean itself up as its being indexed. I resubmitted an updated sitemap that matched my robots.txt and I have gotten rid of the errors.

Google also states that these errors don't directly hurt your ranking, but they can indirectly hurt because of user experience. You can always double check and see if the pages are being indexed by doing a "site:" search in google and checking if those pages exist.

Now, the errors are somewhat of a blessing. We had a design firm who redid our website and they had contracted an SEO "expert" to optimize the site before launch. They launched our website, and the next day I open up GWMT and our entire website was still under "noindex". The forgot to take the noindex from the dev site off of our main site.

Also I would consider just redirecting the thing content all together.

EDIT: And again Ryan sneaks in before me!!!!!!!!

[RyanPurkey]

Thumbs up to Monica's answer. I'd just add that you could redirect some of those pages to thin out the use of no index if possible, but it sounds like you've kept them around as they're marginally useful. You can also click the 'ignore' button for given error messages and they'll go away.

[MonicaOConnor]

No. I wouldn't worry about it. Google calls them errors, the same as a 404 error. To them an error is anything that returns a code other than 200. I have hundreds of noindex pages on my site and it doesn't hurt. I believe it helps because it removes duplicate content and eliminates bad user experiences.

I have always thought that it is Google's way of double checking to make sure that the Webmaster is aware those pages are blocked. There have been times that I found URLs in there that weren't supposed to be, and contrarily found missing URLs as well. Its checks and balances in my opinion.