To Follow or Not To Follow...... ?
-
So, Im working in house with a large company. They have a number of sites which are in need of content up dates etc. In looking around, I noticed
meta name = 'robots'content='noindex,nofollow'
The IT person here who has influence as to what is or is not done; says it should stay that way.
It is my understanding and please correct me if I am wrong..... we generally would like pages followed and indexed.
I'm pretty sure by optimizing on page and making this change it could help the site.....
Thanks for your consideration!!!!
-
I hear ya.
Thank you!
-
Its a simple fix, just have to go up the chain of command w/out ruffling feathers..... I am the new guy.
Thank you.
-
Well it's not really destroyed, that implies a penalty. This is completely reversible.
Just remove the roxots.txt and noindex blocks and the site will come back.
-
Congratulations.
You have a client who has successfully destroyed their own ranking in google.
Aleutianadventures.com - Index of
<cite>www.aleutianadventures.com/</cite>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
-
-
That means the site is entirely blocked. Are you sure the main pages are not being allowed to be indexed? Do a site: search in Google.com to see what is indexed.I would really be surprised if the entire site was intentionally blocked.
If there are main pages indexed he might have intentionally blocked out a large group of low content pages as a response to combating panda. But even in that case they should probably noindex,follow it.
Share the URL and we can take a look.
-
Thank you for the responses... kinda what I thought...
-
My thoughts exactly thank you sir!
-
Mike Davis's answer pretty much hits it on the head. If every page is marked NoIndex,NoFollow then no one will ever find your site unless you specifically direct them to it or they know it exists already... which means you're missing out on a large potential customer base from organic traffic that won't ever be able to find you.
Hell, even those content updates won't matter because the search engines aren't going to care about it (since you told them not to index it) and won't be able to see newer content deeper into the site (since you told it not to follow anything on the page).
-
It really depends on what they want. If your client does not want the search engines to index their site (for whatever reason) than that is correct. I am at a loss as to why they would do that. Tell the "IT" guy that no search engine will lists you guys with this tag on every page. I understand some pages should not be indexed, but an entire site seems counter intuitive. Why would someone want a website if they don't want to be found? It sounds like someone who thinks they know something when they obviously do not.
Tell them to switch all their tags to:
-
all pages
-
Just a bit of clarification needed... what pages are marked "noindex, nofollow"? Sometimes NoIndex,NoFollow or NoIndex,Follow can be useful for certain pages.
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
-
No follow on class - is it correct?
Quetstion, Due to some recent SEO issues on our website on an audit, we found that a potential risk could be all the semi-sitewide links derived from a buy now pay later provider's code in our source code. Our developer implemented Rel= no follow in the following context... <p class="afterpay-paragraph" style="display:block; margin-top:0.3rem;" rel="nofollow"></p class="afterpay-paragraph" style="display:block;> Is what the developer has done, adding it as a class correct? and will it work correctly for SEO? or should i tell the developer to go back and include the no follow code instead as href="https://www.afterpay.com/terms" rel="nofollow"> and add the same to each external .png link too? | |
On-Page Optimization | | oceanstorm
| | |
| | or make 4 interest-free payments of |
| | |
| | fortnightly with |
| | [https://www.afterpay.com/terms](<a class=)"> |
| | |
| | src="https://static.afterpay.com/integration/product-page/logo-afterpay-colour.png" |
| | srcset="https://static.afterpay.com/integration/product-page/logo-afterpay-colour.png 1x, https://static.afterpay.com/integration/product-page/[email protected] 2x, https://static.afterpay.com/integration/product-page/[email protected] 3x" |
| | width="100" height="21" alt="Afterpay"> |
| | More info |
| | |
| | |
| | |0 -
Ecommerce site Header tag compulsory to follow till h6?
Hello Experts? Header tags for homepage, category, product pages is it required to be have from h1 till h6? If No...then w3c validator will give me Warning and it will never Pass my site so? Do google say h1, h2, h3..etc should be in sequence only? As per my site design I cannot define h1 always on top it can be after h2 or h3 so? h1 can be only 1 for per page but it is fine h2, h3 etc multiple for same page? At listing page to give all 30 products names as h3 is fine or it is not correct way? For ecommerce site what is the best header tags you suggest? I mean till h3 is fine or h1 also fine? Do header tags helps google in crawling ? or for ranking purpose? or header tags should be best for blog not for ecommerce site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Johny123450 -
NOINDEX, FOLLOW on product page - how about images indexing?
Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird12290 -
How to view all 'followed internal links' on a page
I am trying to view all the followed internal links on a few pages of my website. The MOZ toolbar just gives me the total number of internal followed links. What is the best way to actually see all the internal links that are followed by the google bot from any particular page? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | rjchugh0 -
No followed links, what happens to the PR?
Hi, I have read a few times, on here and other places that when a website applies a no follow tag to a link the PR is not retained but instead disappears (evaporates) thus neither website benefiting. Is that true? If so what is the actual benefit of no following a link?
On-Page Optimization | | Bondara0 -
To follow or not to follow...?
One of my client's uses alot of links in their content. They follow style and fashion news. Many times I find the use of nofollows unnecessary, but sometimes they have articles with well over 20 oubound links...I wonder if this "drains" the authority/link juice of the page to the point where the long tail traffic wont kick in? Should I have reason for concern, and should I use nofollow on the links? I notice many of our competitors dont really bother, but they also have alot more authority.
On-Page Optimization | | jkellz5140 -
No Follow Internal Links
Hi Mozzers, I know that this has been asked a few times and answered as well, I would just like to know some more on the internal link count on a page. I ran the SEOmoz report and many of the pages on the website have more than 150+ internal links. Now, should I use the rel=nofollow tag on some pages that I feel are not important? I have a list of pages which are not important from the SEO point of view, but from the usability factors they need to be there so I cannot remove the links to them. So, would be OK to place the rel=nofollow tag on them. My whole purpose is to reduce the count of internal links on the page as seen by SE's. Now, some say that the rel=nofollow tag does not lower the link count, but it can definitely (I believe) prevent the bots time in getting to those pages, which SEOmoz report also quotes. (__When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. ) So, probably I can save their time. Does anyone have any views on this, Cheers,
On-Page Optimization | | RanjeetP0 -
Page Shaping - No Follow Links
It's my understanding that adding a nofollow tag to pages that aren't of significance to users can help with page shaping and directing google to the most important links on my home page. I have 4 links on my home page that I'm considering adding a nofollow tag to: Privacy Policy, Legal Policy, Anti-Trust Policy, and Help-Desk Because these links are in the footer on every page I think they're probably sucking up some useful link juice. It's doubtful that anyone would actually search for our privacy policy or legal policy to find our site. I'd rather the juice to spread to other pages of use. What do you guys recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0