Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
-
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
-
In the situation outline by the OP, these pages are noindexed. There’s no value to clutterig up crawl reports on these pages. Block rogerbot from non-critical parts of your site, unless you want to be alerted of issues, then don’t.
-
Thanks, I'm not concerned about the crawl depth of the search engine bots, there is nothing in your fix that would affect that, I'm curious of the decrease in crawl depth of the site with the Moz as we use that to spot issues with the site.
One of the clients I implemented the fix on went from 4.6K crawled pages to 3.4K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.2K pages.
The other client went from 5K to 3.7K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.3K pages.
TL;DR - Good News everybody, the robots.txt fix didn't reduce the crawl depth of the moz crawler!
-
I agree, unfortunately Moz doesn't have an internal disallow feature that gives you the option to feed them info on where rogerbot can and can't go. I haven't come across any issues with this approach, crawl depth by search engine bots will not be affected since the user-agent is specified.
-
Thanks for the solution! We have been coming across a similar issue with some of our sites and I although I'm not a big fan of this type of workaround, I don't see any other options and we want to focus on the real issues. You don't want to ignore the rule in case other pages that should be indexed are marked noindex by mistake.
Logan, are you still getting the depth of crawls after making this type of fix? Have any other issues arisen from this approach?
Let us know
-
Hi Nichole,
You're correct in noindexing these pages, they serve little to no value from an SEO perspective. Moz is always going to alert you of noindex tags when they find them since it's such a critical issue if that tag shows up in unexpected places. If you want to remove these issues from your crawl report, add the following directive to your robots.txt file, this will prevent Moz from crawling these URLs and therefore reporting on them:
User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/*edit - do not prevent all user-agents from crawling these URLs, as it will prevent search engines from seeing your noindex tag, they can't obey what they aren't permitted to see. If you want, once all tag & category pages have been removed from the index, you can update your robots.txt to remove the rogerbot directive and add the disallows for tag & category to the * user agent.
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
-
Unsolved Is Moz Able to Track Internal Links Per Page?
I am trying to track internal links and identify orphan pages. What is the best way to do this?
Moz Pro | Jun 27, 2023, 12:33 PM | WebMarkets0 -
Unsolved Does Moz Pro include Moz Local
My client has bought about six Moz Local accounts and are pleased with results. We have not yet used your Moz Pro program. The client might be interested in switching to the Moz Pro if those Moz Local accounts can be included into it. Please let me know as soon as possible. Thanks!
Moz Pro | Jan 18, 2024, 3:02 PM | gallowaywebteam0 -
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
Moz Pro | Jul 21, 2015, 11:43 AM | Blacktie
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0 -
What's the best way to eliminate "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors?
My company website is built on WordPress. It receives very few crawl errors, but it do regularly receive a few (typically 1-2 per crawl) "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors through Moz. Based on my research, my understand is that my server is essentially telling Moz to cool it with the requests. That means it could be doing the same for search engines' bots and even visitors, right? This creates two questions for me, which I would greatly appreciate your help with: Are "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors harmful for my SEO? I imagine the answer is "yes" because Moz flags them as high priority issues in my crawl report. What can I do to eliminate "429 : Received HTTP status 429" errors? Any insight you can offer is greatly appreciated! Thanks,
Moz Pro | Oct 14, 2014, 11:21 AM | ryanjcormier
Ryan0 -
Noindex/nofollow on blog comments; is it good or bad ?
Hi, I changed the design of one my wordpress website at the beginning of the month. I also added a "facebook seo comments" plugin to rewrite facebook comments as normal comments. As most of the website comments are facebook comments, I went from 250 noindex/nofollow comments to 950; URL's are ?replytocom=4822 etc. Moz campaign noticed it and I'm asking myself : is it good to have comments in noindex/nofollow ? Should I do something about this ? Erwan.
Moz Pro | Jul 5, 2013, 6:51 PM | johnny1220 -
How to resolve Duplicate Content crawl errors for Magento Login Page
I am using the Magento shopping cart, and 99% of my duplicate content errors come from the login page. The URL looks like: http://www.site.com/customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tbW1zcGVjaW9zYS5jb20vcmV2aWV3L3Byb2R1Y3QvbGlzdC9pZC8xOTYvY2F0ZWdvcnkvNC8jcmV2aWV3LWZvcm0%2C/ Or, the same url but with the long string different from the one above. This link is available at the top of every page in my site, but I have made sure to add "rel=nofollow" as an attribute to the link in every case (it is done easily by modifying the header links template). Is there something else I should be doing? Do I need to try to add canonical to the login page? If so, does anyone know how to do it using XML?
Moz Pro | Nov 11, 2014, 5:33 PM | kdl01 -
What Exactly Does "Linking Root Domains" mean??
What Exactly Does "Linking Root Domains" mean?? And how does it affect your ranking for certain Keywords?? Thanks
Moz Pro | Jan 30, 2014, 2:54 PM | Caseman57 -
Meta description tag in rss xml file?
The SEOmoz crawl diagnostic tool is complaining that I'm missing a meta description tag from a file that is an RSS xml file. In my <channel>section I do have a <description>tag. Is this a bug in the SEOmoz tool or do I need to add another tag to satisify the warning?</description></channel>
Moz Pro | Jun 13, 2011, 12:43 PM | scanlin0