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.
Why is our noindex tag not working?
-
Hi,
I have the following page where we've implemented a no index tag. But when we run this page in screaming frog or this tool here to verify the noidex is present and functioning, it shows that it's not.
But if you view the source of the page, the code is present in the head tag. And unfortunately we've seen instances where Google is indexing pages we've noindexed. Any thoughts on the example above or why this is happening in Google?
Eddy
-
Hi Eddy,
Edit: this was already answered before I could post my reply. But I've left the example.
The issue with the meta robots tag is that you are using curly quotation marks around robots and noindex:
You have:
“robots**” content=“noindex”/>
Instead of:
name="robots" content="noindex"**/>This will fix your issue.
Cheers,
David
-
That SF response is from the robots.txt block, not a noindex tag though. SF is also ignoring the incorrectly formatted tag (as it should).
Paul
-
The example page does have a noindex tag in place, but it's not formatted correctly, so it's being ignored. Very subtle issue, but your tag is using "smart quotes" around the elements instead of the plain quotation marks that are required for code. If you look very carefully at the page source code, you'll see that they are quotation marks like you'd see in a Word document; the ones at the beginning of robots and noindex curl a different way than the ones at the end.) This usually occurs when the content was written in a word processor instead of a plain-text editor.
Because the tag's not formatted correctly, it's ignored by both the crawling tools and the search engines.
In addition, the site also has all pages blocked from crawling by the sitewide robots.txt file. This and noindex are conflicting instructions to search engines.
If a page is blocked in robots.txt, then the search engine will not crawl the page and so is not able to discover the noindex tag, even if it were formatted correctly. Therefore if the search engine becomes aware of the page in any other way than straight crawling (and there are a number of ways this can happen), then the page will still get indexed.
If it's a dev site, the proper way to keep it from being indexed is to either noindex all pages, or to put the site behind a password so the search engines and public visitors can't access it. If using noindex, the site must not be blocked with a robots.txt directive.
Does that all make sense?
Paul
-
I ran that page thru screaming frog and it came back with a "blocked by robots" status.
The second tool you suggested is not finding the noindex tag and I don't have an explanation for that, nor am I familiar with the tool.
A site command does not return any results.
Are you sure you have a problem? Is there another example you can provide?
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
-
Near Duplicate Title Tag Checker
Hi Everyone, I know there are a lot of tools like Siteliner, which can check the uniqueness of body copy, but are there any that can restrict the check to the title tags alone? Alternatively, is there an Excel or Google Sheets function that would allow me to do the same thing? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyRSB0 -
Translating meta tags using WPML and AIO SEO
Having a heck of a time finding info on this one... We're working on a multilingual website which uses WPML. I've used the All in One SEO plugin to customize meta data (title, description, etc). These strings do not appear in the list of translations in WPML. Does anyone have any experience with this setup? How do you enable WPML to translate meta data set via the AIO plugin? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc0 -
Conditional Noindex for Dynamic Listing Pages?
Hi, We have dynamic listing pages that are sometimes populated and sometimes not populated. They are clinical trial results pages for disease types, some of which don't always have trials open. This means that sometimes the CMS produces a blank page -- pages that are then flagged as thin content. We're considering implementing a conditional noindex -- where the page is indexed only if there are results. However, I'm concerned that this will be confusing to Google and send a negative ranking signal. Any advice would be super helpful. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Best Practices for Homepage Title Tag
Hi, I would like to know if there is any update about the best practices for the homepage title tag. I mean, a couple of years ago, it was still working placing main keywords in the homepage title tag. But since the last google SERP update, the number of characters that are being shown were reduced, and now we try to work with 55 and 56 characters. That has reduced our capacity of including many keywords on the title tag. Besides, search engines are smarter now to choose the correct inner page to show in SERP. But I am wondering if the Homepage Title should have a branded orientation or should include main keywords, cause it is still working that strategy. I would appreciatte any update in this issue. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
Does a UTM tag influence the linkvalue?
Will Google value a link with a UTM tag the same as a clean link without a UTM tag? I should say that a UTM tag link is not a natural link so the linkvalue is zero. Anyone any idea how to look at this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
How does the use of Dynamic meta tags effect SEO?
I'm evaluating a new client site which was built buy another design firm. My question is they are dynamically creating meta tags and I'm concerned that it is hurting their SEO. When I view the page source this is what I see. <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">keywordsGoHere</a>" content="" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">descriptionGoesHere</a>" content="" /> <title id="<a class="attribute-value">titleGoesHere</a>">title> To me it looks like the tags are not being added to the page, however the title is showing when you view it in a browser and if use a spider view tool, it sees the title. I'm guess it is being called from a DB. So I'm a little concerned though that the search engines are not really seeing the title and description. I'm not worried about the keywords tag. Can anyone shed some light on how this might work? Why it might not being showing the text for the description in the page code and if that will hurt SEO? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BbeS0 -
Why Put an H1 Tag On A Product?
Why would you put an H1 tag on a product name? I came across this in another forum and thought I'd float it here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0