Does the SEOMoz weekly crawl that highlights no meta description tag, take into account if there is a meta robots noindex,follow tag on the pages it indicates the missing meta descriptions?
-
The weekly crawl website report is telling me that there are pages that have missing meta description tags, yet I've implemented meta robots tags to 'noindex, follow' those pages which are visible in those page source files. As far as Google Is concerned, surely this then won't be a problem since it is being instructed NOT to consider these specific pages for indexing. I am assuming that the weekly SEOmoz website crawl is simply throwing the missing meta description crawl findings into its report without itself observing that the particluar URL references contain the meta robots 'noindex,follow' tag ???? Appreciate if you can clairfy if this is the case.
It would help me understand that (at least in terms of my efforts towards Google) your own crawl doesn't observe the meta robots tag instruction, hence the resultant report's flagging the discrepancy.
-
Hey Cyrus!
Nice to bump into you in Q&A
I have to say I actually agree with Adam's view specifically in ensuring that pages have nice relevant page Titles that speak to the user. Even though I may not want a page indexed by a search engine, if users can see it then I should use everything at my disposal to offer good information & encourage conversion. Identifying pages with missing or duplicate information is part of this.
The "ignore" feature will just give me the best of both worlds!
Sha
-
Unfortunately this is one of those issues where there is no "one-sized-fits-all" solution. You are absolutely correct that the search engines most likely don't give a hoot about missing meta description on noindexed pages.
That said, there are a small number of SEOs like Adam Audette that go as far as recommending unique titles and meta data for certain no-indexed pages in order to add relevance. Go figure.
As Sha mentioned, SEOmoz is working on a feature that would allow you to ignore these specific notices. We realize they can be an inconvience in cases like these.
Regardless, thanks for the heads up. Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Hi callassist,
You are correct in assuming that the SEOmoz crawler does not distinguish pages that are noindexed.
There is a simple explanation of the reason for this in a response to this thread by Daniel Deceuster.
As you will see there, a feature request is already in play for a feature to allow users to "turn off" the pages they wish to ignore in their reports (and this would be an example of where that will be very useful). If you follow the link in the previous thread, you will be able to keep updated on progress with the feature request.
Hope that helps,
Sha
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
-
Duplicate Content/Missing Meta Description | Pages DO NOT EXISIT!
Hello all, For the last few months, Moz has been showing us that our site has roughly 2,000 duplicate content errors. Pages that were actually duplicate content, I took care of accordingly using best practice (301 redirects, canonicalization,etc.). Still remaining after these fixes were errors showing for pages that we have never created. Our homepage is www.primepay.com. An example of pages that are being shown as duplicate content is http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/payroll/online-payroll with a referring page of http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/online-payroll. Some of these are even now showing up as 403 and 404 errors. The only real page on our site within that URL strand is primepay.com/payroll or primepay.com/payroll/online-payroll. Therefore, I am not sure where Moz is getting these pages from. Another issue we are having in relation to duplicate content is that moz is showing old campaign url’s tacked on to our blog page i.e. http://primepay.com/blog?title=&page=2&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogCTA&utm_campaign=IRSblogpost&qt-blog_tabs=1. As of this morning, our duplicate content went from 2,000 to 18,000. I exported all of our crawl diagnostics data and looked to see what the referring pages were, and even they are not pages that we have created. When you click on these links, they take you to a random point in time from the homepage of our blog; some dating back to 2010. I checked our crawl stats in both Google and Bing’s Webmaster tool, and there are no duplicate content or 400 level errors being reporting from their crawl. My team is truly at a loss with trying to resolve this issue and any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | PrimePay0 -
SEOMoz On-Page Report Card
This question is for one of the SEOMoz staff. With the ongoing changes and improvement in algorithms, does the SEOMoz team keep the "On-page Report Card" up to date with best practices?
Moz Pro | | tdawson090 -
On Page Grading Not Working
I am not getting any results in on page grading. When I click on add keywords a list of keywords appears that I have previously entered. They have tick boxes next to them and you can filter them but SEO moz is not automtically creating grade reports? Any ideas? Obviously I've set it up wrong somehow.
Moz Pro | | SamCUK0 -
Crawl Test taking 10+ days and still "In Progress" - normal or glitch?
I started a crawl test for my large site - WallStreetOasis.com - on June 20 and still have not received my results. It still says "Crawl in Progress" 10 days later. Does this seem odd or problematic, or is this normal?
Moz Pro | | WallStreetOasis.com0 -
Amount of Pages Crawled Dropped Significantly
I am just wondering if something changed with the SEOMoz crawler. I was always getting 10,000 or near 10,000 pages crawled. After the last two crawls I am ending up around 2500 pages. Has anything changed that I would need to look at it see if I am blocking the crawler or something else?
Moz Pro | | jeffmace0 -
On the Crawl Diagnostics Summary, its reporting over 100 "Title Missing or Empty" issues, but they all check out fine?
Wondering if there Is a bug with the crawler or known timeout issues? Site speed is fast, but we do run a couple of large cron jobs out of hours, which may be the cause of any timeouts, but shouldn't the crawler report that, rather saying no title tags on 100 pages, when there are? SEOmoz newbie, so still finding my feet 🙂
Moz Pro | | sjr4x40 -
Why is Roger crawling pages that are disallowed in my robots.txt file?
I have specified the following in my robots.txt file: Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/ Yet Roger is crawling these pages = 1,357 errors. Is this a bug or am I missing something in my robots.txt file? Here's one of the URLs that Roger pulled: <colgroup><col width="312"></colgroup>
Moz Pro | | MeltButterySpread
| example.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/19241/uenc/aHR0cDovL2ZyZXNocHJvZHVjZWNsb3RoZXMuY29tL3RvcHMvYWxsLXRvcHM_cD02/ Please let me know if my problem is in robots.txt or if Roger spaced this one. Thanks! |0