Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
-
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?
-
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
-
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 -
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
-
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
-
Hi John
Sorry, I have been tied up with travel schedule. Here is the website www.rebelsmarket.com
Thank you for your help John
-
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.
-
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
-
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
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
-
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
I am lost at where to go. My optimization rating is 95% + and rankings are on pages 4+. I would like to know what I should do to increase my rankings.
My site is Glare-Guard.com. My Domain Authority has not moved from 17 in a long time. i have done everything to optimize the different pages. I have 90%+ ratings for the various pages, yet I am still not even close to the first page for many of the keywords I am looking to rank for. Do you have any tips or ideas? Should I try to rewrite my content and add more information? I am just at a loss for where I should go to get the right traffic to my site. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigskyinc0 -
Im scoring 100% in the page optimization, wht else I need to do, because I rank 7-12 in search results
Hi All, Pls check the below url http://www.powerwale.com/inverter-battery for inverter battery keyword in google.co.in im scoring 100% in the page optimization, wht else I need to do, and also I still rank in between 7 to 12 in search results.. How can be in Top 3 search results.. Pls suggest.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1191 -
Brand traffic moved from organic to PPC - could it affect rankings?
Hi, We've just increased a lot of branded PPC clicks for one of our clients. I've worked out that roughly 5000 clicks per month has been moved from organic search to PPC (all brand related search queries). These clicks are very cheap, but the client has expressed worries about what these clicks could do to our organic rankings. Lots of brand search in organic results proves to Google that this is a strong brand, right? So what happens when all the searches are still there, but the organic listings stop getting the clicks? Could this have a ring effect on other non-brand rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Is it okay to copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag?
I have heard conflicting answers to this. I always figured that it was okay to selectively copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag.....especially if the onpage content is well written. How can it be duplicate content if it's pulling from the exact same page? Does anybody have any feedback from a credible source about this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications1 -
Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow. Are there any potential SEO problems here? What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Should I NoIndex NoFollow my BUYNOW page?
Hi, As stated in the title, I am wondering if I should NOINDEX NOFOLLOW my shopping cart page - it is actually a buy now page that receives in the URL the Item ID - only one item per purchase. I received duplication errors so now I added canonical and I wonder if I should simply remove it altogether. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
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 | | PaulRogers0