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 -
How to add Canonical Tags on Opencart Products
Does anyone know how to add canonical tags to product pages in Opencart? Is this possible to do in htaccess? If so, how specifically should it be written in? Please do not post any links to other pages which reference generic canonical information as I've read them all and none help. I'm looking for an Opencart specific answer, or a way to do it in htaccess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently?
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently? Same for an occasional capitalized FREE in meta description. Anybody had experience with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Structured Data + Meta Descriptions
Hey All, Was just looking through some google pages on best practices for meta descriptions and came across this little tidbit. "Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book. " This is the first time I have seen suggested use of structured data in meta descriptions. Does this totally replace a regular meta description or will it work in conjunction with the regular meta description? If I provide both structured data and text, will the SERP display text and the structured data the way it was previously displayed? Or will the 150 -160 character limit take precedence and just cut off all info after that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whebb0 -
Baidu Spider appearing on robots.txt
Hi, I'm not too sure what to do about this or what to think of it. This magically appeared in my companies robots.txt file (literally magically appeared/text is below) User-agent: Baiduspider
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: / I know that Baidu is the Google of China, but I'm not sure why this would appear in our robots.txt all of a sudden. Should I be worried about a hack? Also, would I want to disallow Baidu from crawling my companies website? Thanks for your help,
-Reed0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain
Hi, My programmer recently did a horrible mistkae by adding noindex, nofollow to our website without me noticing for two days. At the same time he did it we bought a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new domain: The Old domain is: http://www.websitebuildersworld.com and the new one is: http://www.websiteplanet.com Now unfortunatly I didn't notice the noindex,nofollow when it was on the old domain and I redirected it to websiteplanet.com before I fixed the noindex, nofollow. I fixed the problem around 10 hours ago on the new domain (www.websiteplanet.com) but the old domain didn't get indexed back (yet), so for example if you search for WebsiteBuildersWorld in google you will not reach the homepage as google deleted it because of the noindex,nofollow. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ouzan
Do you think that it will be fixed and google will retrieve websitebuildersworld homepage to his search results and then redirect it to websiteplanet? Or because I redirected websitebuildersworld.com to websiteplanet.com before letting google crawling websitebuildersworld.com without the noindex,no follow it wouldn't get indexed again? I hope I explained the problem good enough. Looking forward for your valuable replies. Thanks.0 -
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