undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?

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.

Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
4
9
2.3k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • JimJ
    JimJ last edited by Nov 22, 2018, 3:04 AM

    We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace.  Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content)

    Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done

    I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
    • JimJ
      JimJ @GastonRiera last edited by Dec 26, 2018, 9:01 PM Dec 26, 2018, 9:01 PM

      Hi Gaston

      Thank you for the detailed response and suggestions. I will follow up with my findings. Point 3 and 4; - I think there is something there.

      James

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • GastonRiera
        Gaston Riera @JimJ last edited by Dec 26, 2018, 9:52 AM Dec 26, 2018, 9:52 AM

        Hi James,

        Great that you've checked out those items and there aren't errors.

        I'd break my response into bullet points so its easier to respond 🙂

        1- I'm bugged that the traffic loss occurs in the same month as the https redirection. 
        That completely tells me that you've either killed, redirected or noindexed some pages that drove a lot of traffic. 
        2- Also it could be possible that you didn't deserve that much traffic due to either being ranked on searches that you weren't relevant or Google didn't fully understand your site. That often happens when migration takes places, as Google needs to re-calculate and fully understand the new site.

        3- If you have still on the old HTTP search Console property, I'd check as many (and in some scalable way) keywords as possible, trying to find which have fallen out in rankings.
        4- When checking those keywords, compare URLs that were ranked, there could be some changes.

        5- And lastly, have you made sure that there aren't any indexation and/or Crawlability issues? Check the raw number of indexable URLs and compare it with the number that Search Console shows in the index coverage report.

        Best wishes.
        GR

        JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Dec 26, 2018, 9:01 PM Reply Quote 0
        • JimJ
          JimJ @GastonRiera last edited by Dec 25, 2018, 6:41 AM Dec 25, 2018, 6:41 AM

          Hi Gaston

          Thank you for sharing your insights.

          1. I have looked through all the pages and made sure we have not noindexed important pages

          2. The migration went well; no double redirects or duplicate content.

          3. I looked through Google search console - Fixed all the errors; (mostly complains about 404 error caused by products that are out of stock or from vendors who leave the website)

          4. A friend said he thinks our pages are over-optimized - and hence that could be the reason; We went ahead and tweaked all the pages that were driving traffic; but change.

          If you have a moment here is our website: www.rebelsmarket.com - If there is anything that standsout please let me know. I appreciate your help

          James

          GastonRiera 1 Reply Last reply Dec 26, 2018, 9:52 AM Reply Quote 0
          • JimJ
            JimJ @jasongmcmahon last edited by Dec 25, 2018, 6:34 AM Dec 25, 2018, 6:32 AM

            Hi Joe

            We have applied all the redirects carefully and tested them to make sure; we have no duplicate content

            The url:  www.rebelsmarket.com

            Redirect to SSL: March 2018 (we started with the blog and then moved to products page)

            We added; noindex and nofollow tags at the sametime;

            Thank you

            James

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • JimJ
              JimJ @JohnSammon last edited by Dec 25, 2018, 6:31 AM Dec 25, 2018, 6:31 AM

              Hi John

              Sorry, I have been tied up with travel schedule. Here is the website www.rebelsmarket.com

              Thank you for your help John

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • jasongmcmahon
                jasongmcmahon last edited by Dec 19, 2018, 1:23 AM Dec 19, 2018, 1:23 AM

                Hi James,

                Yiut issues lie elsewhere - did anything else happen during the update? My first thoughts are that the redirects were incorrectly applied.

                • Whats the URL?
                • When was the redirect HTTP > HTTPS installed & how?
                • When was  noindex and nofollow tags added?

                You're a month in, so you should be able to recover. Sharing the URL would be useful if you need any further assistance.

                JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Dec 25, 2018, 6:32 AM Reply Quote 0
                • topic:timeago_earlier,15 days
                • JohnSammon
                  JohnSammon last edited by Dec 4, 2018, 10:08 AM Dec 4, 2018, 10:08 AM

                  Hey James - would you be comfortable sharing the URL? I can run some diagnostics on it to see what other issues could be the cause of the drop.

                  Thanks!

                  John

                  JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Dec 25, 2018, 6:31 AM Reply Quote 0
                  • topic:timeago_earlier,11 days
                  • GastonRiera
                    Gaston Riera last edited by Nov 23, 2018, 12:30 AM Nov 23, 2018, 12:30 AM

                    Hi James,

                    I'm sorry to hear that you've lost over 45% of your traffic.
                    Absolutely not, having a lot of noindex and nofollow pages won't affect your rankings and your SEO strength.

                    On the other hand, a traffic drop could be related to many issues, some of them:

                    • Algorithm changes, there has been a lot of movement this year
                    • You've noindexed some of your high traffic pages
                    • Some part of the migration gone wrong
                    • And the list could be endless.

                    I'd start checking Search Console, there you could spot which keywords and/or URLs are those that aren't ranking that high.

                    It might come handy, this sort of tutorial on analyzing a traffic drop: How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer - Moz Blog

                    Hope it helps.
                    Best luck.
                    GR

                    JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Dec 25, 2018, 6:41 AM Reply Quote 0
                    • 1 / 1
                    1 out of 9
                    • First post
                      1/9
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • gamstopbet

                      Will critical error in wordpress for memory limit affect seo rankings?

                      will critical error in wordpress to increase memory limit affect seo rankings?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 20, 2021, 12:37 PM | gamstopbet
                      0
                    • yaelslater

                      Page with metatag noindex is STILL being indexed?!

                      Hi Mozers, There are over 200 pages from our site that have a meta tag "noindex" but are STILL being indexed. What else can I do to remove them from the Index?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 17, 2019, 7:11 PM | yaelslater
                      0
                    • Brenda.Haines

                      Looking for opinions on structuring meta title tags/page title/menu title/H1

                      Hi everyone I am hoping a few of you can share your opinions. I have been having conversations (okay, healthy debates) about how to write/structure meta title tag and how to compliment them with the H1, page title, menu name. To help explain the thought processes I will use a pretend keyword. How about "screwdriver". Case: (I made this up) we are redesigning a website for a construction tools manufacturing company (pretend name: ABC Tools) targeting OEMs who are interested in purchasing large quantities of tools. The product categories (to become main menu items) are Screwdrivers, Nails, Drills, and Hammers. (bear with me .... this is just an example I am making up on the fly) K. Circling back to screwdrivers - let's say we have one landing page (a primary category page and in the main menu) listing products and great details about screwdrivers. Focus keywords are screwdriver manufacturer, screwdriver supplier, construction screwdrivers Below are questions being debated. If you are willing ... how would you address these questions? And, can you explain WHY? QUESTION ONE: How would you structure the meta title tag (feel free to write one of your own) Screwdriver Manufacturer - Construction Screwdriver | ABC Tools ABC Tools - US-based Screwdriver Manufacturer Supplier Near You High-Quality Screwdrivers for Construction with ABC Tools QUESTION TWO: how would you write the H1 on the page? Would it match the meta tag? OR, would you write something different using the primary keyword? QUESTION THREE Remembering this is not a blog post ... it is a primary landing page linked to the main navigation. What would the menu title be? (remember the product categories above are how the main menu items are bucketed) Screwdrivers Screwdriver Manufacturer Typically in WordPress, the H1 and the menu title is auto-populated using the page title (not the title tag)... So, if we use Screwdrivers as the page title but we want the H1 to match the meta title tag, would we manually change the H1? Or, have the page title and title tag match, but manually change the menu item?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 14, 2019, 9:32 PM | Brenda.Haines
                      1
                    • ColesNathan

                      Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages

                      The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 8, 2018, 3:58 PM | ColesNathan
                      0
                    • ParisChildress

                      If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?

                      Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 13, 2018, 4:51 PM | ParisChildress
                      1
                    • BeytzNet

                      Do Page Views Matter? (ranking factor?)

                      Hi, I actually asked it a year and a half ago (with a slight variation) but didn't get any real response and things do change over time. On my eCommerce website I have the main category pages with client side filtering and sorting. As a result, the number of page views is lower than can be expected. Do you think having more page views is still a ranking factor? and if so is it more important than user experience? Thanks

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 2, 2015, 7:52 PM | BeytzNet
                      1
                    • fabioricotta-84038

                      How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?

                      Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post  about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 9, 2014, 8:06 PM | fabioricotta-84038
                      0
                    • bjs2010

                      Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow

                      Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
                      "There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
                      "Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 15, 2013, 10:18 PM | bjs2010
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.