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.
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
-
Hi all,
I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions
We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS!
Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination).
After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt"So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt.
So coming to my question.
-
Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index?
-
Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index?
I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”.I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index.
Thanks!
B
-
-
There's no real way to estimate how long the re-crawl will take, Ben. You can get a bit of an idea by looking at the crawl rate reported in Google Webmaster Tools.
Yes, asking for a page fetch then submitting with linked pages for each of the main website sections can help speed up the crawl discovery. In addition, make sure you've submitted a current sitemap and it's getting found correctly (also reported in GWT) You should also do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools. Too many sites forget about optimizing for Bing - even if it's only 20% of Google's traffic, there's no point throwing it away.
Lastly, earning some new links to different sections of the site is another great signal. This can often be effectively & quickly done using social media - especially Google+ as it gets crawled very quickly.
As far as your other question - yes, once you get the unwanted URLs out of the index, you can add the robots.txt disallow back in to optimise your crawl budget. I would strongly recommend you leave the meta-robots no-index tag in place though as a "belt & suspenders" approach to keep pages linking into those unwanted pages from triggering a re-indexing. It's OK to have both in place as long as the de-indexing has already been accomplished, as we've discussed.
Hope that answer your questions?
Paul
-
So once Google has started to see the meta-noindex and is slowly deindexing pages, once that is done, I would like to block it from crawling them with a robots.txt to conserve my crawl budget.
But, there are still internal links on the site that point to these URL´s - would they get back into the index in this case?
-
Hi Paul,
Thank you for your detailed answer - so I'm not going crazy
I did try with canonicals but then realized they are more of a suggestion as opposed to a directive and I am still correcting a lot of dupe content and 404's so I am imagining that Google view's the site as "these guys don't know what they are doing' so may have ignored the canonical suggestion.
So what I have done is remove the robots block on the pages I want de-indexed and add in meta noindex, follow on these pages - From what you are saying, they should naturally de-index, after which, I will put the robots.txt block back on to keep my crawl budget spent on better areas of the site.
How long in your opinion can it take for Googlebot to de-index the pages? Can I help it along at all to speed up? Fetch page and linking pages as Googlebot?
Thanks again,
Ben
-
You're right to be confused, B. The terminology is unfortunate and misleading.
To answer your questions
1. Yes
2. Yes.
A disallow in robots.txt does nothing to remove already-indexed pages. That's not its purpose. Its only purpose is to tell the search crawlers not to waste their time crawling those pages. Even if pages have been blocked in robots, they will remain in the index if already there. Even if never crawled, and blocked in robots.txt, they can still end up indexed if some other indexed page links to them and the crawlers find those pages by following links. Again, nothing in a robots.txt disallow tells the engines to remove a page from the index, just not to waste time crawling it.
Put another way, the robots.txt disallow directive only disallows crawling - it says nothing about what to do if the page gets into the index in other ways.
The meta-robots no-index tag however explicitly states to the crawler "if you arrive at this page, do not add it to the index. If it is already in the index, remove it".
And yea - as you suspected - if pages are blocked in robots.txt, the crawler obeys and doesn't visit those pages So it can't discover the no-index command to drop them from the index. Thus the only way a page could get dropped is if a crawler followed a link from an external site and discovered the page that way. A very inefficient way of trying to get all those pages out of the index.
Bottom line - robots.txt is never the correct tool to deal with duplicate content issues. It's sole purpose is to keep the crawlers from wasting time on unimportant pages so they can spend more time finding (and therefore indexing) more important pages.
The three tools for dealing with duplicate content are meta-robots no-index tags in a page header, 301 redirects, and canonical tags. Which one to use depends on the architecture of your site, your intended purpose, and the site's technical limitations.
Hope that makes sense?
Paul
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
-
Looking for opinions on structuring meta title tags/page title/menu title/H1
Hi everyone I am hoping a few of you can share your opinions. I have been having conversations (okay, healthy debates) about how to write/structure meta title tag and how to compliment them with the H1, page title, menu name. To help explain the thought processes I will use a pretend keyword. How about "screwdriver". Case: (I made this up) we are redesigning a website for a construction tools manufacturing company (pretend name: ABC Tools) targeting OEMs who are interested in purchasing large quantities of tools. The product categories (to become main menu items) are Screwdrivers, Nails, Drills, and Hammers. (bear with me .... this is just an example I am making up on the fly) K. Circling back to screwdrivers - let's say we have one landing page (a primary category page and in the main menu) listing products and great details about screwdrivers. Focus keywords are screwdriver manufacturer, screwdriver supplier, construction screwdrivers Below are questions being debated. If you are willing ... how would you address these questions? And, can you explain WHY? QUESTION ONE: How would you structure the meta title tag (feel free to write one of your own) Screwdriver Manufacturer - Construction Screwdriver | ABC Tools ABC Tools - US-based Screwdriver Manufacturer Supplier Near You High-Quality Screwdrivers for Construction with ABC Tools QUESTION TWO: how would you write the H1 on the page? Would it match the meta tag? OR, would you write something different using the primary keyword? QUESTION THREE Remembering this is not a blog post ... it is a primary landing page linked to the main navigation. What would the menu title be? (remember the product categories above are how the main menu items are bucketed) Screwdrivers Screwdriver Manufacturer Typically in WordPress, the H1 and the menu title is auto-populated using the page title (not the title tag)... So, if we use Screwdrivers as the page title but we want the H1 to match the meta title tag, would we manually change the H1? Or, have the page title and title tag match, but manually change the menu item?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brenda.Haines1 -
Sanity Check: NoIndexing a Boatload of URLs
Hi, I'm working with a Shopify site that has about 10x more URLs in Google's index than it really ought to. This equals thousands of urls bloating the index. Shopify makes it super easy to make endless new collections of products, where none of the new collections has any new content... just a new mix of products. Over time, this makes for a ton of duplicate content. My response, aside from making other new/unique content, is to select some choice collections with KW/topic opportunities in organic and add unique content to those pages. At the same time, noindexing the other 90% of excess collections pages. The thing is there's evidently no method that I could find of just uploading a list of urls to Shopify to tag noindex. And, it's too time consuming to do this one url at a time, so I wrote a little script to add a noindex tag (not nofollow) to pages that share various identical title tags, since many of them do. This saves some time, but I have to be careful to not inadvertently noindex a page I want to keep. Here are my questions: Is this what you would do? To me it seems a little crazy that I have to do this by title tag, although faster than one at a time. Would you follow it up with a deindex request (one url at a time) with Google or just let Google figure it out over time? Are there any potential negative side effects from noindexing 90% of what Google is already aware of? Any additional ideas? Thanks! Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags
Hi, Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is. The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible. Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Tools to test meta descriptions?
Hey does anyone know of any tools which can test your meta descriptions against competitors meta descriptions for specific keyword terms. I know one tool called SERP Turkey which uses mechanical turk, i was wondering if there is any others on the market? Even a tool which can automatically score your meta description against others on the SERP results page. E..g optimised, keyword, call to action, etc. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Should you include domain / brand in Meta Title
Hello, I am trying to come up with a strategy for creating meta title information for my eCommerce store. I have read mixed reviews on the examples below. The first includes the company / brand in the meta title and thus is included in SE results. The second does not. Probably not a 'right' answer here so I look forward to answers with rationale... also open to a completely difference strategy all together! 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - $Company_Name OR 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - Pre Workout Supplement Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 6thirty0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0