Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
-
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow".
Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator.
Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be...
Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check?
Thanks!
-
Well you're on Wordpress and are using YoastSEO. When a Wordpress category is created, a URL is generated for that category.
Your sitemap was created with Yoast:
Sitemap Last Modified |
|
- 2018-08-23 08:10 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:21 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:08 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-07 10:40 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:10 +01:00
|
- 2018-08-23 08:13 +01:00
|
I can see your articles are indexed now, but I would still recommend removing the Wordpress category URL's from your sitemap. Since the sitemap is commonly used for the things you want Google to crawl and index, I would add the article urls and content with "index,follow" webpages directly to your xml sitemap instead of linking the category pages you don't want indexed.
(IE: ie: http://www.genetex.com/sitemap.xml)
Yoast should give you this option in the settings for xml sitemap generation. If not, I would recommend using Screaming Frog to generate the sitemap.
-
Just as an update to this question, I submitted XML sitemaps directly to the blog articles and those pages are still not showing in the Google SERPs. It seems that new pages are discovered quite quickly (as per Google Alerts) but are then dropped from the index within a day or so.
The only pages which are returned consistently are links to the page which allows comments to be added.
The links which were initially identified as broken, were not actually broken so there was nothing to fix there.
Next step I can think of is to attempt some page sculpting by setting a noindex on the comments pages...
If anyone has any more thoughts or ideas, I'd appreciate your input
-
Great - thanks for your help
-
I resubmitted the sitemap for the blog in GWT and no errors were found...
I have to say I am v surprised at the number of dead links - we don't have that many blog posts so unless this is indicating content on our main site (where the pages are still . Even then, as I mentioned to Alan, the only missing content Google Webmaster Tools picks up on is where event tracking is used and it thinks the label is a link.... I did ask Google about these erroneous missing page and they said there was nothing that can be done to indicate they're not meant to be pages and that it would not affect the site's quality.
BTW, An article we published a few hours ago is now showing up in the Google results so it does seem like the rest of the pages have been penalised
Time to figure out what's going on with the missing pages...
Thanks, Irving
-
i sent the list, i had a bit of a look and it may be that they were timing out
-
Thanks Alan, have DM'ed you.
-
Submit a sitemap.xml file for these pages you want indexed, If they are linked to on the site and not blocked in robots.txt they will get indexed again. Definitely fix that sick amount of broken links, Google could be determining that these pages are not worth anything because the links on them are all dead ends.
-
The broken links were found using the Bing api. so bing will see them as such,
If yougive me a email, i willl send you the list
-
39 no-index pages on the blog could be correct with the category pages.
I'm quite surprised at the number of broken links - is this specific to /blog and are they actual links? GWT usually picks up event tracking as broken links...
Good point about the homepage - I should get a canonical tag on that...
Thanks!
-
I found 39 pages that have been no-index, does that add up?
I also found 33,000 broken links.
anouther problem you have is that both http://www.abcam.com/blog/ and http://www.abcam.com/blog/index.cfm are linked to in your site, this means that the pagerank is split. you should link to only http://www.abcam.com/blog/
-
The blog homepage is http://www.abcam.com/blog
@Alan: The rest of the site is indexable, just the the blog area where noindex has been used (the blog homepage and category pages are auto-generated and repeat a lot of the content in the articles)
@Shailendra: Yes, they were indexed - the last Google Alert which specifically highlights content from the blog is mid-June.
-
Firstly, you don't need to write index,follow on normal pages. Secondly, as you say, "no longer showing in Google SERPs", this means that it was earlier indexed, right? Now if it is no longer in Google's index, it means penalization. Please give the url of your website.
-
It may have something to do with the homepage being noindex, as that is unusual.
Can we get a url, I may find what you missed?
-
Hi,
Can you please share URL ?
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
-
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content. And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rignite0 -
Should I consider webmaster tools links and linked pages ratio to remove unnatural links?
I don't know this is a suitable place for post this question. Anyway I have done it. According to the Google webmaster tools, Links to your site page. My blog has considerable amount of links, from linked pages (from certain domain names). For an instance please refer following screenshot. When I am removing unnatural links, should I consider these, links from linked pages ratio? Almost all of these sites are social bookmarking sites. When I publish a new bookmark on those sites, they automatically add a homepage link. As a result of that, I got a huge number of home page links from linked pages. What is your recommendation? Thanks! webmaster.png web_master_tools.png
Technical SEO | | Godad0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
External Linking & Your sites Link juice
Hey guys, quick question. Does a page lose link juice when it gives link juice? If I link to an outside site, do I lose that same amount of link juice or is it just applied to there site and not removed from mine? I understand that linking to a competitor can in turn help him and hurt me (if he then is seen as more relevant than me to google) but does it have a direct relation to hurting/removing my page link juice? Hope this all makes sense. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
301ed Pages Still Showing as Duplicate Content in GWMT
I thank anyone reading this for their consideration and time. We are a large site with millions of URLs for our product pages. We are also a textbook company, so by nature, our products have two separate ISBNs: a 10 digit and a 13 digit form. Thus, every one of our books has at least two pages (10 digit and 13 digit ISBN page). My issue is that we have established a 301 for all the 10 digit URLs so they automatically redirect to the 13 digit page. This fix has been in place for months. However, Google still reports that they are detecting thousands of pages with duplicate title and meta tags. Google is referring to these page URLs that I already have 301ed to the canonical version many months ago! Is there anything that I can do to fix this issue? I don't understand what I am doing wrong. Example:
Technical SEO | | dfinn
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=9780321676672
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=032167667X As you can see the 10 digit ISBN page 301s to 13 digit canonical version. Google reports that they have detected duplicate title and meta tags between the two pages and there are thousands of these duplicate pages listed. To add some further context: The ISBN is just a parameter that allows us to provide content when someone searches for a product with the 10 or 13 digit ISBN. The 13 digit version of the page is the only physical page that exists, the 10 digit is only a part of the virtual URL structure of the website. This is why I cannot simply change the title and meta tags of the 10 digit pages because they only exist in the sense that the URL redirects to the 13 digit version. Also, we submit a sitemap every day of all the 13 digit pages so Google knows exactly what our physical URL structure is. I have submitted this question to GWMT forums and received no replies.0 -
Does Google follow links in "id" tag?
Hello, For functionality purposes, I need to wrap separate blocks of content with a tag. The main question is whether Google will follow this URL, even though it is not a hyperlink on the page, just a URL used for functionality purposes. We will have 10-20 of these types of span tags with a different URL for each one, and we just want to be sure that Google will not be following these URLs that are not links. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0