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
-
SEO / Word Press feature
We are wanting to refresh old posts on our blog and schedule them to get “republished” to the home page of our blog on a future date. However, when we edit the “Published” settings date and set it to a future date, the post gets removed from the blog and put back into a “Scheduled” status. Many of these posts are “evergreen” and bringing in traffic so we don’t want to have them get removed from our site. So to recap, we need the ability to be able to reschedule already published posts to get “re-published” back on our home page without having them get removed from the site. Does anyone know of a plugin or solution to this problem? Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | eyepaq0 -
Meta Keywords - Should I define them myself
Hi All, Im sure this has been answered somewhere but I couldn't find it. SEOQuake etc suggest you should define meta keywords. However I was under the impression that this was not best practice Can anyone confirm what I should do/ is best practice? Cheers Bowey
Technical SEO | | CFCU0 -
Duplicate content warning for a hierarchy structure?
I have a series of pages on my website organized in a hierarchy, let's simplify it to say parent pages and child pages. Each of the child pages has product listings, and an introduction at the top (along with an image) explaining their importance, why they're grouped together, providing related information, etc.
Technical SEO | | westsaddle
The parent page has a list of all of its child pages and a copy of their introductions next to the child page's title and image thumbnail. Moz is throwing up duplicate content warnings for all of these pages. Is this an actual SEO issue, or is the warning being overzealous?
Each child page has tons of its own content, and each parent page has the introductions from a bunch of child pages, so any single introduction is never the only content on the page. Thanks in advance!0 -
Are nofollow, noindex meta tags healthy for this particular situation?
Hi mozzers, I am conducting an audit for a client and found over 200 instances using meta tags(nofollow, noindex). These were implemented essentially on Blog pages/category pages, tags not blog posts which is a good sign. I believe that tagged URLs aren't something to worry about since these create tons of duplicates. In regards to the category page, i feel that it falls in the same basket as tags but I am not positive about it. Can someone tell me if these are fine to have noindex, nofollow? Also on the website subnav which are related to the category pages mentioned prev, the webmaster have implemented noindex,follow(screenshot below), which seems ok to me? am i right? Thanks 8egLLbo.png?1
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?
Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1011 -
Question about Robot.txt
I just started my own e-commerce website and I hosted it to one of the popular e-commerce platform Pinnacle Cart. It has a lot of functions like, page sorting, mobile website, etc. After adjusting the URL parameters in Google webmaster last 3 weeks ago, I still get the same duplicate errors on meta titles and descriptions based from Google Crawl and SEOMOZ crawl. I am not sure if I made a mistake of choosing pinnacle cart because it is not that flexible in terms of editing the core website pages. There is now way to adjust the canonical, to insert robot.txt on every pages etc. however it has a function to submit just one page of robot.txt. and edit the .htcaccess. The website pages is in PHP format. For example this URL: www.mycompany.com has a duplicate title and description with www.mycompany.com/site-map.html (there is no way of editing the title and description of my sitemap) Another error is www.mycompany.com has a duplicate title and description with http://www.mycompany.com/brands?url=brands Is it possible to exclude those website with "url=" and my "sitemap.html" in the robot.txt? or the URL parameters from Google is enough and it just takes a lot of time. Can somebody help me on the format of Robot.txt. Please? thanks
Technical SEO | | paumer800 -
Noindex, nofollow on a blog since 2009
Just reviewed a WordPress blog that was launched in 2009 but somehow the privacy setting was to not index it, so all this time there's been a noindex, nofollow meta tag in the header. The client couldn't figure out why masses of content wasn't showing up in search results. I've fixed the setting and assume Google will spider in short order; the blog is a subdirectory of their main site. My question is whether there is anything else I can or should do. Can Google recognize the age of the content, or that it once had a noindex meta tag? Will it "date" the blog as of today? Has the client lost out on untold benefits from the long history of content creation? I imagine that link juice from any backlinks to the blog will now flow back to the main site; think that's true? Just curious what others might think of this scenario and whether any other action is warranted.
Technical SEO | | vickim0 -
Redesign existing websites / worried about urls / mapping
Hi Guys, While redesigning existing websites that will have page name changes such as: example.com/products to be called example.com/solutions example.com/about-us to be called example.com/about should I 301 the old url to the new url. In the past I have not done this & I'm just wondering from an SEO point of view how bad is this? (On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is this not 301ing urls, 10 being really bad & 1 being fine), Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0