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 Robot Tag:Index, Follow, Noodp, Noydir
-
When should "Noodp" and "Noydir" meta robot tag be used?
I have hundreds or URLs for real estate listings on my site that simply use "Index", Follow" without using Noodp and Noydir. Should the listing pages use these Noodp and Noydr also? All major landing pages use Index, Follow, Noodp, Noydir. Is this the best setting in terms of ranking and SEO.
Thanks, Alan
-
Hey,
Can anyone help me out with how I can add keywords with noodp directives?
-
I'll add further that Open Directory (DMOZ) will be shutting down March 14 (2017).
And so the internet outgrows it's training wheels....
-
Yes, for the most part "index, follow" is what you want on your pages.
But no, the "noodp, noydir" tags do not prevent you from being in the directories (though as Alan pointed out, the Yahoo one isn't around anymore), they just prevent the descriptions from being used.
Google does not always use the title and description found on your page, it sometimes chooses something it deems more relevant. Sometimes this is the description from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes this is not a good thing to choose.
Maybe your site was quite different when it was submitted to the directory, and the information there no longer applies. You want to tell Google not to use what is in there, so you use noodp in the header.
Whether you use or do not use "noodp, noydir", it won't hurt your rankings.
The only reason you might want to make sure to use them is if you saw unexpected content in the descriptions of your pages in the search results pages, and you had reason to believe the descriptions came from DMOZ. In that case, to prevent that from happening, you would use those additional tags, along with "index, follow".
-
Thanks Linda!!
So by adding the noydir for instance, the specific URL would not be indexed by Yahoo?
I don't quite understand the utility of this!!! I would think that something like a property listing should appear.
For instance our home page has this tag set up like this: name="robots" content="noodp,noydir"/><meta< span=""></meta<>
Wouldn't this exclude our home page from Yahoo and the Open Directory? Now I am particularly concerned because most of our major landing pages have the "noodp,noydir" tag.
Are we doing something wrong??
In term of my original question, are site has many listings and the default tag is
name="robots" content="index, follow"/><meta< span=""></meta<>Is there any downside to setting up this way?
Thanks!!! Alan
-
I'll just add that Yahoo closed the Yahoo Directory down last year.
-
Noodp= No Open Directory Project
Noydir= No Yahoo DirectoryThese are used if your website is listed in one of these directories with information you do not want used in the results pages. This might be the case if you have old, outdated listings that no longer apply. They tell robots not to use information from these sources, and they are optional.
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
-
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
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 -
Proper Title Tags for ecommerce
In terms of E-commerce title tags. We are a manufacturer of our own clothing products. We are new to the SEO landscape so if this question is an obvious answer, then i apologize for wasting any one times in advance. We Manufacture our own clothing. Each item has a name. The names are American womens names such as amanda or lori or jenniffer etc. When we create the title tag for them should we include the name of the item itself at the beginning or end. For example should it be Item Name - Keyword - Keyword - Brand Name(aka manufacturer) or Keyword - Keyword - Item Name - Brand Name (aka manufacturer) The reason we ask this is because we think it would be a waste to rank for actual American names such as Jennifer and Jessica. All that we have read on Moz suggests that it seems to be better to have pertinent keywords in the beginning of the title as opposed to the end. In terms of our brand name we already rank number 1 for every combination of our brand. So we would like to start picking up traffic for the different product types we sell and there respective synonyms. Not sure if i am making any sense. Sorry in advance, and any help is very very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Imagination0 -
Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?
Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Infinite Scrolling: how to index all pictures
I have a page where I want to upload 20 pictures that are in a slideshow. Idea is that pictures will only load when users scroll down the page (otherwise too heavy loading). I see documentation on how to make this work and ensure search engines index all content. However, I do not see any documentation how to make this work for 20 pictures in a slideshow. It seems impossible to get a search engines to index all such pictures, when it shows only as users scroll down a page. This is documentation I am already familiar with, and which does not address my issue:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload http://luis-almeida.github.io/unveil/ thank you0 -
Meta tags - are they case sensitive?
I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description. It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages, I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following: name="Description" content=" I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as: name="description" content=" Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Redirecting index.html to the root
Hi, I was wondering if there is a safe way to consolidate link juice on a single version of a home page. I find incoming links to my site that link to both mysite.com/ and mysite.com/index.html. I've decided to go with mysite.com/ as my main and only URL for the site and now I'd like to transfer all link juice from mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
When i tried 301 redirect from index.html to the root it created an indefinite loop, of course. I know I can use a RewriteRule.., but will it transfer the juice?? Please help!7