Why are "noindex" pages access denied errors in GWT and should I worry about it?
-
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
-
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.
-
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!!!!!!!!
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vitzz1 -
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
Recommend Layout Page (home, categories or section, individual page)
Hello Could you please share with me your advice and recommendations on how to design a SEO layout (H1, Image, body text, etc). I need to give instructions to our website designer. I would like to see some examples. We are going to work with wordpress and visual composer. I really appreciate your help and time Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GHSCostaRica0 -
Need help understanding "Clone sites"
I just read an article about Panda and it warned against against Clone sites: "Clone sites are a strong panda factor (JM, Mar 10, 2014)" I don't have any clone sites, but there are dozens of sites with imitations of mine. We were the first in the area of interest, and then all these other sites that imitated us popped up. None are exact replicas. But many have spun some of our articles and used them to create their sites; the site structures are not identical though. Google seems to know we are the original site on the topic since we are ranked #1 for most terms. Would these be considered clone sites in their eyes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
Hi, we are a South African insurance company. We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance. Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely. This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes". The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery. The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car". Your help would be appreciated, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | miway0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Has important is it to set "priority" and "frequency" in sitemaps?
Has anyone ever done any testing on setting "priority' and "frequency" in their sitemaps? What was the result? Does specifying priority or frequency help quite a bit?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline2