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
-
Page not being ranked properly
Hi, Wondering if someone could possibly shed some light on why some of our pages are not being ranked properly on Google. For example this page https://www.mypetzilla.co.uk/dog-breeds Keyword "Dog Breeds" we can't be found on and we are absolutely baffled why? Could it be that we are listing all 100 and something dog breeds on one page? Should we introduce pagination or load more as user scrolls down. This page has been up for at least 4 years. Any suggestion or advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mypetzilla0 -
Do uncrawled but indexed pages affect seo?
It's a well known fact that too much thin content can hurt your SEO, but what about when you disallow google to crawl some places and it indexes some of them anyways (No title, no description, just the link) I am building a shopify store and it's imposible to change the robots.txt using shopify, and they disallow for example, the cart. Disallow: /cart But all my pages are linking there, so google has the uncrawled cart in it's index, along with many other uncrawled urls, can this hurt my SEO or trying to remove that from their index is just a waste of time? -I can't change anything from the robots.txt -I could try to nofollow those internal links What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Syndicated content with meta robots 'noindex, nofollow': safe?
Hello, I manage, with a dedicated team, the development of a big news portal, with thousands of unique articles. To expand our audiences, we syndicate content to a number of partner websites. They can publish some of our articles, as long as (1) they put a rel=canonical in their duplicated article, pointing to our original article OR (2) they put a meta robots 'noindex, follow' in their duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. A new prospect, to partner with with us, wants to follow a different path: republish the articles with a meta robots 'noindex, nofollow' in each duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. This is because he doesn't want to pass pagerank/link authority to our website (as it is not explicitly included in the contract). In terms of visibility we'd have some advantages with this partnership (even without link authority to our site) so I would accept. My question is: considering that the partner website is much authoritative than ours, could this approach damage in some way the ranking of our articles? I know that the duplicated articles published on the partner website wouldn't be indexed (because of the meta robots noindex, nofollow). But Google crawler could still reach them. And, since they have no rel=canonical and the link to our original article wouldn't be followed, I don't know if this may cause confusion about the original source of the articles. In your opinion, is this approach safe from an SEO point of view? Do we have to take some measures to protect our content? Hope I explained myself well, any help would be very appreciated, Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fabio80
Fab0 -
6 months Later - 0 Domain Authority/Page Authority and losing Rankings
Hi Moz, Sorry if this comes across as a "Do My Job For Me" type of post but we are an E-Commerce store that have been live since January but have not seen any increase in performance on our site and over the past month, have even seen our rankings decrease. We have 1300 products on site and about 1500 pages in total. 1. As for on-site optimization, we have got 2 reviews and follow up reviews with a highly reputable reviewer from People Per Hour and solved any issues she has found. 2. Updated the Meta Data for products and Alt Descriptions for images focusing on the keywords we wish to rank for. We post weekly blogposts linking back to our products. 3. Social Media Campaigns with regular campaigns on FaceBook, Pinterest, Google+ and Twitter. 4. Attempted to build FOLLOW backlinks to articles relating to products on our site. We have also considered purchasing backlinks to improve our situation as we have yet to see any of these pages be crawled by Google over a month later. I have read a guides on Moz and other sites on how to improve our authority and improve rankings but none have offered much by way of practical solution. My question being, is this just a matter of patience or should I be worried/improving anything given we have 0 Domain Authority and Page Authority on all pages? Thanking you in advance, SEO Novice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csworkwear0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Is it a good strategy to create pages that are specific to different keywords to rank higher in SEO?
We have a main website and a local website. Would it be a right strategy to create new pages on the local website specific to rank for certain keywords in the non-branded space? Is creating new pages to rank for keywords the right approach? I
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedExLocal0 -
Wrong page ranking for keyword - should I move the better content over?
We have a page which is outranking another page for a keyword that is very important. The page that is lower in the rankings has far better content. I think this is happening due to links as well as the url structure. domain.com/ranking/notranking Here is the page we want to rank: http://bit.ly/1vqhSoZ Here is the page that is higher in rankings: http://bit.ly/1vA1wXQ So I think I should just move the content over from /notranking, to /ranking. The content is clearly better on the lower ranking page but I think due to links the /ranking page is higher in SERPS. So I guess my question is, would it be wise to move all that content over, and then 301 redirect the old page? Or leave the way it is and hopefully Google will get it right over time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DemiGR1 -
Internal Duplicate Pages causing dip in rankings
Hi Guys, Need help in understanding whether having duplicate pages on your site push you down in rankings. Our all product pages getting indexed by Google with different parameters i.e. filters, affiliate id, utm_source etc. and then we have 10-15 duplicate for one product page. I am observing dip in rankings whenever Google starts indexing these duplicate but when I asked this question to John Muller and other Google team they said if you set up canonical then you don't have to worry about having different urls for same page but we are not ranking on Google and if we do then we dropped from page 1 to page 2 or sometimes page 3. Example - http://goo.gl/G5p3X5 Any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0