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.
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
-
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages:
However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
-
Thanks, appreciate you taking the time to write out a response!
-
Thank you for your reply. I will get this information over to the dev team!
-
Hi Chris
If Google sees a link to the page it may still list it in its index even though when they got there they saw the noindex tag so they didn't crawl it.
The rational is they see a link from your main site with some anchor text and index the link based on the anchor text they can't crawl it because you say not to, but they still have some information about the page from your anchor text.
Here is a direct Matt Cutts Quote:
"Our highest duty has to be to our users, not to an individual webmaster. When a user does a navigational query and we don’t return the right link because of a NOINDEX tag, it hurts the user experience (plus it looks like a Google issue). If a webmaster really wants to be out of Google without even a single trace, they can use Google’s url removal tool."
REF: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-noindex-behavior/
You can block access to the test site (which is what we do) via htacess (if you're on a Linux Server) and use the Google Index Removal Tool to strip out the currently indexed pages.
I hope that helps.
-
If you have nofollow on all the pages, there is a chance it is being caused because google can't follow any links to your pages tho crawl and update them with the no-index tag.
Try changing your links to noindex, follow.
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
-
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Does using data-href="" work more effectively than href="" rel="nofollow"?
I've been looking at some bigger enterprise sites and noticed some of them used HTML like this: <a <="" span="">data-href="http://www.otherodmain.com/" class="nofollow" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a <="" span="">Instead of a regular href="" Does using data-href and some javascript help with shaping internal links, rather than just using a strict nofollow?</a>
Technical SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Should I nofollow search results pages
I have a customer site where you can search for products they sell url format is: domainname/search/keywords/ keywords being what the user has searched for. This means the number of pages can be limitless as the client has over 7500 products. or should I simply rel canonical the search page or simply no follow it?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Adding 'NoIndex Meta' to Prestashop Module & Search pages.
Hi Looking for a fix for the PrestaShop platform Look for the definitive answer on how to best stop the indexing of PrestaShop modules such as "send to a friend", "Best Sellers" and site search pages. We want to be able to add a meta noindex ()to pages ending in: /search?tag=ball&p=15 or /modules/sendtoafriend/sendtoafriend-form.php We already have in the robot text: Disallow: /search.php
Technical SEO | | reallyitsme
Disallow: /modules/ (Google seems to ignore these) But as a further tool we would like to incude the noindex to all these pages too to stop duplicated pages. I assume this needs to be in either the head.tpl or the .php file of each PrestaShop module.? Or is there a general site wide code fix to put in the metadata to apply' Noindex Meta' to certain files. Current meta code here: Please reply with where to add code and what the code should be. Thanks in advance.0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0
