Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
-
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
-
In the situation outline by the OP, these pages are noindexed. There’s no value to clutterig up crawl reports on these pages. Block rogerbot from non-critical parts of your site, unless you want to be alerted of issues, then don’t.
-
Thanks, I'm not concerned about the crawl depth of the search engine bots, there is nothing in your fix that would affect that, I'm curious of the decrease in crawl depth of the site with the Moz as we use that to spot issues with the site.
One of the clients I implemented the fix on went from 4.6K crawled pages to 3.4K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.2K pages.
The other client went from 5K to 3.7K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.3K pages.
TL;DR - Good News everybody, the robots.txt fix didn't reduce the crawl depth of the moz crawler!
-
I agree, unfortunately Moz doesn't have an internal disallow feature that gives you the option to feed them info on where rogerbot can and can't go. I haven't come across any issues with this approach, crawl depth by search engine bots will not be affected since the user-agent is specified.
-
Thanks for the solution! We have been coming across a similar issue with some of our sites and I although I'm not a big fan of this type of workaround, I don't see any other options and we want to focus on the real issues. You don't want to ignore the rule in case other pages that should be indexed are marked noindex by mistake.
Logan, are you still getting the depth of crawls after making this type of fix? Have any other issues arisen from this approach?
Let us know
-
Hi Nichole,
You're correct in noindexing these pages, they serve little to no value from an SEO perspective. Moz is always going to alert you of noindex tags when they find them since it's such a critical issue if that tag shows up in unexpected places. If you want to remove these issues from your crawl report, add the following directive to your robots.txt file, this will prevent Moz from crawling these URLs and therefore reporting on them:
User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/*edit - do not prevent all user-agents from crawling these URLs, as it will prevent search engines from seeing your noindex tag, they can't obey what they aren't permitted to see. If you want, once all tag & category pages have been removed from the index, you can update your robots.txt to remove the rogerbot directive and add the disallows for tag & category to the * user agent.
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
-
Unsolved Why doesn't moz notify me of missing image alt tags
We had a client come to us and let us know another vendor had notified them that many of the images on their site are missing alt tags / text. I know this was a big deal back in the day, but I haven't heard much about it lately. I am assuming if it doesn't even show up in the Moz site crawl, it must not be a big deal any more, but I would love to have more info about how important image alt tags are and if they are important, why Moz does not report them.
Moz Pro | | CaliberMG1 -
Yahoo Store Beginner with "duplicate content" errors. Can I pay for support? $$$
Hi. I have a Yahoo store that seems to have many errors. We built the site for utility knowing NOTHING about SEO. We just started with MOZ and would love to PAY someone to help get us past the beginning stages. Is there someone familiar with the Yahoo! Store format that can charge us perhaps in hourly blocks to walk us through possible solutions to issues? One issue we are having... seems to be that our subsections which contain items that are the endpoints... I know of no way to label the sections anything but an "item". I'm wondering if this might be causing the "duplicate" error because a specific item is listed both in the section and on it's own page. please help! Thom 888-567-5194
Moz Pro | | TITOJAX0 -
How do Moz tools handle signs for "PHRASE" and [EXACT MATCH] KW queries?
Hello, As some of my projects are in competitive niche markets, I often chase exact match KW to handle with. However, when using 'Moz >> Keyword Difficulty Report' I'm getting SAME Search Volume result - regardless using broad match, phrase or exact match KWs. Have I missed something? Ranking result's and are however different and seems to correspond to different type of KW search ( which type of KW all its. Please share some light on this.
Moz Pro | | SEOisSEO0 -
"Too many on-page links" warning on all of my Wordpress pages
Hey guys, I've got like 120 "Too many on-page links" warnings in my crawl diagnostics section. They're all the pages of my WordPress blog. Is this an acceptable and expected warning for Wordpress or does something need to be better optimized? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Crawl Test produced only 1 page
Hi, I recently submitted a crawl for www.cirrato.com using SEOMoz Crawl Test Tool. I have a lot of pages, but the crawl result shows only 1 page, which is the front page and nothing else... Does anyone know what this could mean or what the problem is?
Moz Pro | | yusufcirrato0 -
Duplicate page error from SEOmoz
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. I'm trying to use a rel=canonical but maybe I'm not doing it right. This page is the original, definitive version of the content: https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/sent-2011-10-01 This page is an alias that points to it (each month the alias is changed to point to the then current issue): https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/latest-issue The alias page above contains this tag (which is also updated each month when a new issue comes out) in the section: Is that not correct? Is the https (vs http) messing something up? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | scanlin0 -
Do crawl reports see canonical tags?
Greetings, I just redesigned my site, www.funderstanding.com, and have the old site pointing to the new site via canonical URLs. I had a new crawl test run and it showed a large amount of duplicate content. Does the SEO Moz crawl tool validate canonical urls and adjusts the duplicate content count or is this note considered? FYI, I sent from no duplicate content to having 865 errors since the redesign went up so that seems suspicious. I would think though that assuming the canonical tag were used properly, and I hope it is?, that this would not be a problem?? All help with this is most appreciated. Eric
Moz Pro | | Ericc220 -
Why is blocking the SEOmoz crawler considered a red "error?"
Why is blocking the SEOmoz crawler considered a red "error?" Please see attached image... Y3Vay.png
Moz Pro | | vkernel0