Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?

[RocketZando]

Hi,

We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as:

on all of the site.

I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass.

So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc.

And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site).

Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/

I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting.

And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing.

Cheers,

[Nobody1560986989723]

Can't answer the API question I'm afraid.

However on the other bits - if you don't specify robots directive, search engines are likely to behave in the default manner - i.e. index, follow unless you're blocking them another way (i.e. robots.txt)

A good test of this would be if you've launched a page since the 17th and it's not in Google's index and you know you've been crawled.

Check in GWT for your crawl data - and don't worry about the cache because your users will always be taken to the current version of your site. It's only a concern if you're no longer being crawled.

If it's an ecommerce site, then it should just be one site-wide tweak to put index,follow back in. Re-create and re-submit your sitemap.xml to GWT then Google will go after all your new content as well - i.e. it hurries up re-crawling.

Hoping something helped you there