Warnings for blocked by blocked by meta-robots/meta robots Nofollow...how to resolve?
-
Hello,
I see hundreds of notices for blocked by meta-robots/meta robots nofollow and it appears it is linked to the comments on my site which I assume I would not want to be crawled. Is this the case and these notices are actually a positive thing? Please advise how to clear them up if these notices can be potentially harmful for my SEO.
Thanks,
Talia
-
The notices in the SEOmoz PRO platform are just that - notices. They are neither good nor bad in themselves, but we want you to be aware of them in case the issues are not supposed to be there.
In the case of comments such as yours, there are very legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want these crawled or indexed, depending on your situation (duplicate content issues, link to spam, etc) If you are aware why the issues are appearing, and comfortable with your reasoning, it's perfectly fine to have notices in your account.
-
If you are talking about Google Webmaster reporting that blog comments are blocked or no-followed, then yes, that is a good thing. Normally, it's a pretty good idea to make sure that any links that are added to blog comments are no-follow.
However, you do want to make sure that you are not blocking the blog post itself from being indexed or crawled. Just double-check the URL that Webmaster is reporting. If it's just for comment links, then your all good. If it's for the whole URL, then you might want to consider modifying your robots.txt file to make sure that your blog page is crawled but comment links are not.
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
-
Should a login page for a payroll / timekeeping comp[any be no follow for robots.txt?
I am managing a Timekeeping/Payroll company. My question is about the customer login page. Would this typically be nofollow for robots?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
Meta tag Syntax
Hi, This might seem silly. What is the correct syntax for the meta tag used when noindexing webpages? I have "". I have seen it both with and without the forward slash before the greater than sign. Does it make any difference if the forward slash is present or not? Cheers
Technical SEO | | McCaldin0 -
How do I deal with /mobile/ page after responsive re-design?
Hi guys, One of our clients used to have a website that would redirect mobile traffic to a /mobile/ page. Thankfully we've finally gone fully responsive and there is no need for this /mobile/ page. Trouble is, www.clientsite.com.au**/mobile/** is still in the Google index and going to a 404 right now. What is the best way to deal with it? Should we be 301 redirecting /mobile/ to / (the home page)? Would be most grateful for any ideas. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | WCR0 -
Redirecting root to /default.aspx
Hello, I have a client who's home page redirects to /default.aspx - what are the possible SEO impacts of this? As the home page redirects to /default.aspx and does not load under both there does not seem to be a duplicate content issue. Also the redirect should carry over most of the link juice from the home page to /default.aspx therefore are there any negative SEO "side effects" of this set-up? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | RikkiD220 -
Robots.txt
Hello Everyone, The problem I'm having is not knowing where to have the robots.txt file on our server. We have our main domain (company.com) with a robots.txt file in the root of the site, but we also have our blog (company.com/blog) where were trying to disallow certain directories from being crawled for SEO purposes... Would having the blog in the sub-directory still need its own robots.txt? or can I reference the directories i don't want crawled within the blog using the root robots.txt file? Thanks for your insight on this matter.
Technical SEO | | BailHotline0 -
Mobile site - allow robot traffic
Hi, If a user comes to our site from a mobile device, we redirect to our mobile site. That is www.mysite/mypage redirects to m.mysite/mypage. Right now we are blocking robots from crawling our m. site. Previously there were concerns the m. site could rank for normal browser searches. To make sure this isn't a problem we are planning on rel canonical our m. site pages and reference the www pages (mobile is just a different version of our www site). From my understanding having a mobile version of a page is a ranking factor for mobile searches so allowing robots is a good thing. Before doing so, I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions/feedback (looking for potential pitfalls, issues etc)
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
How to see a theme ‘/wp-content/themes/’
HI I'm still plugging away at getting to grips with my companies personalized blog. I've been trying for the past two days to upload a theme to my own test Wordpress blog, in order to correct a bug in the companies theme that makes formatting in the Post disappear. The code in the themes CSS file seems to be fine. Anyhow what I assumed would be a simple step has given me hours of hassle. I have finally got to the point of uploading an unzipped version of the theme intot ‘/wp-content/themes/’. Now try as I might my Wordpress admin is completely blind to the fact. Any attempt at using the Upload facility (which is what I attempted many hours ago) fails. There seems to be no place to say, look out there at my directory - a new original theme - unzipped and ready to go. Am I missing something very obvious?
Technical SEO | | catherine-2793880