MOZ crawl report says category pages blocked by meta robots but theyr'e not?
-
I've just run a SEOMOZ crawl report and it tells me that the category pages on my site such as http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/ are blocked by meta robots and have the meta robots tag noindex,follow.
This was the case a couple of days ago as I run wordpress and am using the SEO Category updater plugin. By default it appears it makes categories noindex, follow. Therefore I edited the plugin so that the default was index, follow as I want google to index the category pages so that I can build links to them.
When I open the page in a browser and view source the tags show as index, follow which adds up. Why then is the SEOMOZ report telling me they are still noindex,follow?
Presumably the crawl is in real time and should pick up the new follow tag or is it perhaps because its using data from an old crawl?
As yet these pages aren't indexed by google.
Any help is much appreciated!
Thanks
Sam.
-
Hi Megan,
Thanks for your reply. I'll run a crawl now and hopefully all will be okay.
Sam.
-
Hi Sam! This is Megan from SEOmoz. I've had our engineers take a look at your campaign and everything looks good now. Do you know if you made any changes today that would fix the 'blocked by meta robots' issue? Your next crawl that comes through should reflect the new information - showing the previously blocked URLs as "index, follow". If you're still running in to any problems, feel free to shoot us a message to help@seomoz.org and we'll check it out!
Cheers!
-
Thanks for your reply. The Robots.txt reads:
User-agent: *Disallow: /wp-admin/Disallow: /wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/sitemap.xml.gz
As fas as I'm aware this is okay?
Sam.
-
And is your robots.txt file inline with the on page directives?
If all is good I would just put it down to a moz error, sometimes you just need to be aware of the issues and warnings rather than act on them.
All the best
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
-
Why doesn't my website crawl by Google?
Hi mozzers and members, I am having issues, why my website: http://profilecosmeticsurgery.com/ crawl by Google? let me share more clearly when this starts happening. A month or around 45 days back our website is being indexed and crawled quite well without any issues with having .html extension pages with static built website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOOOOOoooooooo
We finally thought to change to .php version and make whole website and its pages to be treated dynamically.
Once we changed all changes, thereafter this issues started. It has been more than 45 days, our website isn't being crawled since then. I didn't know what are the things preventing this to? Please help. Thanks in Advance Capture1.PNG0 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Not alt tags but Title and description Meta: My designer's answer.
Hello! I was busy doing lots of key wording for my images which I hate and notices that when viewed in source code, the different places I inputed information translated into Title and Description meta tags but NO alt tags. As I'm a a photographer, it's really important to me that I make the most of my images to get increased traffic so I challenged the people behind my website about it. This is their response to the question: "We all know how important the alt tags are for image SEO so why does
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid
the design allows Title, Description and Keyword image tags but not alt
tags?" Unfortunately, there is no way to add an alt tag and title tag specifically to an image display page. However, as you have pointed out here, we use other elements that essentially accomplish the same thing. Each image display page does have its own page title and meta description, as you have also noticed. For the title, we use the IPTC Headline field (if there is no headline, then we use IPTC Title, and if there is no title, then we go to file name), and for the meta description, we use both the IPTC caption as well as the keywords - so all of that information is embedded on the image display page with the image itself and search engines can index this content. Alt Text data intends to given contextual information to search engines when they crawl your site, and the IPTC metadata that shows along with your images, does this as well." What is your opinion on that answer?0 -
Structure: Should an eCommerce blog have main menu links to each of the store category pages?
Hi, Should my eCommerce site's blog have menu links to the store's category pages? (like in the store itself) The meaning is that every blog post page will have links to category pages that are not related and probably weakens the in-text relevant links. The other option is to have menu links only to the blog category pages and in-article links to the relevant store category pages (maybe add menu button "Go to Store"). Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
E-commerce site, one product multiple categories best practice
Hi there, We have an e-commerce shopping site with over 8000 products and over 100 categories. Some sub categories belong to multiple categories - for example, A Christmas trees can be under "Gardening > Plants > Trees" and under "Gifts > Holidays > Christmas > Trees" The product itself (example: Scandinavian Xmas Tree) can naturally belong to both these categories as well. Naturally these two (or more) categories have different breadcrumbs, different navigation bars, etc. From an SEO point of view, to avoid duplicate content issues, I see the following options: Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking. Use the same URL and display only one "main" version of breadcrumbs and menus. Possibly add the other "not main" categories as links to the category / product page. Use a different URL based on where we came from and do nothing (will create essentially the same content on different urls except breadcrumbs and menus - there's a possibiliy to change the category text and page title as well) Use a different URL based on where we came from with different menus and breadcrumbs and use rel=canonical that points to the "main" category / product pages This is a very interesting issue and I would love to hear what you guys think as we are finalizing plans for a new website and would like to get the most out of it. Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arikbar0 -
Should I block temporary pages
I need some SEO advice on an odd scenario: We are launching a new product line (party supplies) on it's own domain (PartySuperCenter.com). Due to some internal/technical reasons we will not be able to launch the site until the summer. We already have the product in our warehouse so the owners want to created a section on our current site (CostumeSuperCenter.com) for the new products. Once the new site is up the product will be removed from our current site and moved to the new site. I am concerned about the effect this will have on our SEO - having thousands of product pages appear and then disappear after a few months. I was thinking about blocking the pages using the "noindex" tag. Is this how you would handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0 -
Will Google Visit Non-Canonicalized Page Again and Return Its Page's Original Ranking?
I have 2 questions about canonicalization. 1. Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B? 2. If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0