Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?

    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.

    Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    9
    2326
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • JimJ
      JimJ last edited by

      We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace.  Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content)

      Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done

      I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • JimJ
        JimJ @GastonRiera last edited by

        Hi Gaston

        Thank you for the detailed response and suggestions. I will follow up with my findings. Point 3 and 4; - I think there is something there.

        James

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • GastonRiera
          Gaston Riera @JimJ last edited by

          Hi James,

          Great that you've checked out those items and there aren't errors.

          I'd break my response into bullet points so its easier to respond 🙂

          1- I'm bugged that the traffic loss occurs in the same month as the https redirection. 
          That completely tells me that you've either killed, redirected or noindexed some pages that drove a lot of traffic. 
          2- Also it could be possible that you didn't deserve that much traffic due to either being ranked on searches that you weren't relevant or Google didn't fully understand your site. That often happens when migration takes places, as Google needs to re-calculate and fully understand the new site.

          3- If you have still on the old HTTP search Console property, I'd check as many (and in some scalable way) keywords as possible, trying to find which have fallen out in rankings.
          4- When checking those keywords, compare URLs that were ranked, there could be some changes.

          5- And lastly, have you made sure that there aren't any indexation and/or Crawlability issues? Check the raw number of indexable URLs and compare it with the number that Search Console shows in the index coverage report.

          Best wishes.
          GR

          JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • JimJ
            JimJ @GastonRiera last edited by

            Hi Gaston

            Thank you for sharing your insights.

            1. I have looked through all the pages and made sure we have not noindexed important pages

            2. The migration went well; no double redirects or duplicate content.

            3. I looked through Google search console - Fixed all the errors; (mostly complains about 404 error caused by products that are out of stock or from vendors who leave the website)

            4. A friend said he thinks our pages are over-optimized - and hence that could be the reason; We went ahead and tweaked all the pages that were driving traffic; but change.

            If you have a moment here is our website: www.rebelsmarket.com - If there is anything that standsout please let me know. I appreciate your help

            James

            GastonRiera 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • JimJ
              JimJ @jasongmcmahon last edited by

              Hi Joe

              We have applied all the redirects carefully and tested them to make sure; we have no duplicate content

              The url:  www.rebelsmarket.com

              Redirect to SSL: March 2018 (we started with the blog and then moved to products page)

              We added; noindex and nofollow tags at the sametime;

              Thank you

              James

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • JimJ
                JimJ @JohnSammon last edited by

                Hi John

                Sorry, I have been tied up with travel schedule. Here is the website www.rebelsmarket.com

                Thank you for your help John

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • jasongmcmahon
                  jasongmcmahon last edited by

                  Hi James,

                  Yiut issues lie elsewhere - did anything else happen during the update? My first thoughts are that the redirects were incorrectly applied.

                  • Whats the URL?
                  • When was the redirect HTTP > HTTPS installed & how?
                  • When was  noindex and nofollow tags added?

                  You're a month in, so you should be able to recover. Sharing the URL would be useful if you need any further assistance.

                  JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • JohnSammon
                    JohnSammon last edited by

                    Hey James - would you be comfortable sharing the URL? I can run some diagnostics on it to see what other issues could be the cause of the drop.

                    Thanks!

                    John

                    JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • GastonRiera
                      Gaston Riera last edited by

                      Hi James,

                      I'm sorry to hear that you've lost over 45% of your traffic.
                      Absolutely not, having a lot of noindex and nofollow pages won't affect your rankings and your SEO strength.

                      On the other hand, a traffic drop could be related to many issues, some of them:

                      • Algorithm changes, there has been a lot of movement this year
                      • You've noindexed some of your high traffic pages
                      • Some part of the migration gone wrong
                      • And the list could be endless.

                      I'd start checking Search Console, there you could spot which keywords and/or URLs are those that aren't ranking that high.

                      It might come handy, this sort of tutorial on analyzing a traffic drop: How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer - Moz Blog

                      Hope it helps.
                      Best luck.
                      GR

                      JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Got a burning SEO question?

                      Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                      Start my free trial


                      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.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • Kingalan1

                        Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?

                        Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                        1
                      • Kingalan1

                        Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page

                        My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
                        -Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
                        -If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
                        -Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
                        -I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
                        | Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
                        | Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
                        | Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
                        | Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
                        | 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                        0
                      • Alexcox6

                        Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page

                        Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder. 
                        https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
                        You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps. 
                        I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
                        0
                      • Ullamalm

                        Ranking 2 pages on the same domain in the same SERP

                        I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm
                        0
                      • dkeipper

                        Page Rank Worse After Optimization

                        For a long time, we had terrible on page SEO. No keyword targeting, no meta titles or descriptions. Just a brief 2-4 sentence product description and shipping information. Strangely, we weren't ranking too bad. For one product, we were ranking on page 1 of Google for a certain keyword. My goal to reach the top of page 1 would be easy (or so I thought). I have now optimized this page to rank better for the same keyword. I have a 276 word description with detailed specifications and shipping information. I have a strong title and meta description with keywords and modifers. I have also included a video demonstration, additional photos and an PDF of the owners manual. In my eyes, the page is 100% better than it ever was. In the eyes of MOZ, it's better also. I've got an A with the On-Page Grader. Why is this page now ranking on page 8 of Google? What have I done wrong? What can I do to correct it?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkeipper
                        0
                      • ABK717

                        Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?

                        We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK717
                        0
                      • Peter264

                        NOINDEX or NOINDEX,FOLLOW

                        Currently we employ this tag on pages we want to keep out of the index but want link juice to flow through them: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> Is the tag above the same as: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"> Or should we be specifying the "FOLLOW" in our tag?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
                        0
                      • PaulRogers

                        Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?

                        I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers
                        0

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      • Digital Marketers
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • Local Citation Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter
                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.