Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
-
Hi,
Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page?
The situation:
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article).Now we could end up with something like this:
Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None?Thanks a lot,
Jan -
I can confirm chris is correct, our crappy CMS does the same thing (for certain pages), and the pages are not indexed
-
Why not try to avoid the problem altogheter? I assume the below line is site-wide:
If you remove the index, follow meta tag, your pages will still be indexed and followed. Then allow your authors to decide on a post-by-post basis if they want to noindex or nofollow the page.
-
The two get aggregated or the most restrictive gets used so in this case, you'd get
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html
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
-
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Effect of 302 redirects from empty parent page to sub page
A client's website has links to their service pages which then redirect (302 through a php "Location:" header) to that service's first sub-page. For example, our-services/service-x redirects to our-services/service-x/about-service-x I can only think this has been done because there is no actual content for the parent page and to maintain some kind of structure for navigation and URLs. Really there's no reason why the 'about-service-x' page can't be removed and its content transferred to the main 'service-x' page. Then the redirects can be removed also - it's not how a 302 should be used for a start. I'm just wondering what kind of effect this current redirection has on SEO, as I know 302s don't pass any link juice? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | driftingbass0 -
Crawl Test Report only shows home page and no inner site pages?
Hi, My site is [removed] When I first tried to set up a new campaign for the site, I received the error: Roger has detected a problem: We have detected that the root domain [removed] does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. I then ran a Crawl Test per the FAQ. The SEOmoz crawl report only shows my home page URL and does not have any inner site pages. This is a Joomla site. What is the problem? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | crave810 -
Do I need both canonical meta tags AND 301 redirects?
I implemented a 301 redirect set to the "www" version in the .htaccess (apache server) file and my logs are DOWN 30-40%! I have to be doing something wrong! AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com
Technical SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm
RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] IndexIgnore *
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.luckygemstones.com/internal-serv-error.htm
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.luckygemstones.com/forbidden-request.htm
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.luckygemstones.com/not-authorized.htm I've also started adding canoncial META's to EACH page: I'm using HMTL 4.0 loose still--1000's of pages--painful to convert to HTML5 so I left the / off the tag so it would validate. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks, Kathleen0 -
Translating Page Titles & Page Descriptions
I am working on a site that will be published in the original English, with localized versions in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. All the versions will use the English information architecture. As part of the process, we will be translating the page the titles and page descriptions. Translation quality will be outstanding. The client is a translation company. Each version will get at least four pairs of eyes including expert translators, editors, QA experts and proofreaders. My question is what special SEO instructions should be issued to translators re: the page titles and page descriptions. (We have to presume the translators know nothing about SEO.) I was thinking of: stick to the character counts for titles and descriptions make sure the title and description work together avoid over repetition of keywords page titles (over-optimization peril) think of the descriptions as marketing copy try to repeat some title phrases in the description (to get the bolding and promote click though) That's the micro stuff. The macro stuff: We haven't done extensive keyword research for the other languages. Most of the clients are in the US. The other language versions are more a demo of translation ability than looking for clients elsewhere. Are we missing something big here?
Technical SEO | | DanielFreedman0 -
I use All in one SEO pack for wordpress and i i have 2 meta tags i need to delete them is this the meta description tag ?
add_option("aiosp_post_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_page_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_home_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Home Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_do_log", null, 'All in One SEO Plugin write log file', 'yes'); */
Technical SEO | | fhnhockey0880 -
What to do about "blocked by meta-robots"?
The crawl report tells me "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling". One of these interesting facts is that my blog archives are "blocked by meta robots". Articles are not blocked, just the archives. What is a "meta" robot? I think its just normal (since the article need only be crawled once) but want a second opinion. Should I care about this?
Technical SEO | | GPN0