De-indexing search results noindex, follow or noindex, nofollow
-
If search results were not originally blocked with robots.txt, and need to be de-indexed, is it better to use noindex, nofollow or noindex, follow?
-
Each situation is unique so there's no one answer. Here's a great article by Lindsay on options.
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
-
Bolded words in search results
are those synonyms or semantically related keywords ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
301 redirect to search results page?
Hi - we just launched our redesigned website. On the previous site, we had multiple .html pages that contained links to supporting pdf documentation. On this new site, we no longer have those .html landing pages containing the links. The question came up, should we do a search on our site to gather a single link that contains all pdf links from the previous site, and set up a redirect? It's my understanding that you wouldn't want google to index a search results page on your website. Example: old site had the link http://www.oldsite.com/technical-documents.html new site, to see those same links would be like: http://www.newsite.com/resources/search?View+Results=&f[]=categories%3A196
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Google Search Console
abc.com www.com http://abc.com http://www.abc.com https://abc.com https://www.abc.com _ your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
Internal nofollows?
We have a profile page on our site for members who join. The profile page has child pages that are simply more specific drill-downs of what you get on the main profile page. For example: /roger displays all of roger's posts, questions, and favorites and then there are /roger/posts, /roger/questions, /roger/favorites. Since the child pages contain subsets of the content on the main profile page, we canonical them back to the main profile page. Here's my question: The main profile page has navigation links to take you to the child pages. On /roger, there are links to: /roger/posts, /roger/questions, and /roger/favorites. Currently, we nofollow these links. Is this the right way to do it? It seems to me that it's a mistake, since the bots will still crawl those pages but will not transfer PR. What should we do instead: 1. Make the links js links so the child pages won't be crawled at all? 2. Make the links follow so that PR will flow (see Matt Cutts' advice here)? Apprehension about doing this: won't it dilute crawl budget (as opposed to #1)? 3. Something else? In case the question wasn't confusing enough... here's another piece: We also have a child page of the profile that is simply a list of members (/roger/friends). Since this page does not have any real content, we are currently noindex/nofollow -ing it and the link to this page is also nofollow. I'm thinking that there's a better solution for this as well. Would love your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Puzzling drop in search referrals.
Hello All, A few weeks ago I posted in the Q and A believing I had received a google penalty due to a sudden and considerable drop in referrals... http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penalty-8 ... so I dug right to the bottom of my site and did a complete review of all my links. After clearing all the potentially problematic links, I wrote a very descriptive reconsideration request to google. 10 days or so later I received a 'no manual spam action found' response, which I guess is a good thing but now begs the question- what has gone wrong!? Over the past 4 or 5 months I've been doing some heavy work on the SEO of my site, www.madegood.org. This has all been white hat stuff (as far as I'm aware), and have been using my seomoz pro account to monitor progress. I've done lots of reading on the subject so think I'm up to scratch on most general good advice, in terms of link building and site structure. I've always tried to create very high quality content and have been building some great links from very authoritative sites including The Guardian newspaper and Sheffield University. My pro dashboard is telling me that my link analysis history is improving, despite my keyword performance declining. Is there anyone that can do a deep review of my site? I'm happy to share my analytics/webmaster tools etc info with you if that is helpful? I'm totally lost here and am becoming disheartened with all the hard work I've been putting into the SEO for my site. Thanks so much in advance, any help is gratefully received. Of course I can provide more info should you need it. Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madegood0 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0 -
My blog is showing in search results instead of my homepage and this is fine, but less than ideal. Any idea on how I can fix this?
My blog is showing in search results instead of my homepage and this is fine, but less than ideal. Any idea on how I can fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisClever0