Meta Robots query
-
Hi guys,
I was ranking really well on my home page for certain keywords which has all dropped pretty dramatically over the last 3/4 weeks - I think the issue is since since the configuration of Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin.
In March (when my rankings were strong) my crawl test showed the top data in the attached image, and in May (now the rankings have dropped severly) they show the bottom data.
I don't fully understand canonical and Meta Robots so I am hoping someone can shed some light on the following points.
1. Will the change result in my loss of rankings.
2. How can I put it back to how it was in March?PS. I haven't had any Google penalties.
Thanks,
Joshua -
Hi Joshua
Thanks, I see the ranking drop. However, have you lost traffic? I see most positions were on the 2nd page to begin with. I see this quite often, when sites don't rank on page #1, the rankings can drop/jump a lot around pages 2-5. I know it's not fun seeing a "drop" but ultimately I would focus on your traffic as a mindset.
I ask if this is a fairly new site, because it's a super competitive niche, and I'm surprised it ranked that well to begin with. If it's a new site, often Google will rank it higher for a little while to see how users react to it, and then it may settle back to a more "normal" ranking.
I'd also check your Search Analytics report in Search Console - do you see Impression and Position drops across the board? It's tempting to analyze only a few top keywords, but I'd try to look at things as a whole too.
-
Hi Joshua
The noodp would not be playing a role in this. It only instructs Google to not use data from the Open Directory Project in snippets, but has no other effect at all.
-
Rankings drop:
On April 14th all of these rankings dropped on the same day by 10+ places and have got worse since.
-
Hi Dan,
The issue seems to be that since I installed Yoast SEO and have had sitewide noodp activated that the rankings have dropped.
Do you think this could be playing a part?
Thanks,
Joshua
-
Hi Joshua
The settings look OK - what keywords were you ranking for that have now dropped? Also, when was the site launched?
-Dan
-
Can anyone help further with this?
-
Hi Eric,
Thanks a lot for your reply.
I wonder how it is possible that when the website was set to block robots, no index & follow and no rel-canonical it was ranking really well and since the change it has severly dropped?
What are the best settings to have for my home page which has most of the backlinks pointing to it?
Thanks,
Joshua -
Joshua, it looks as if you turned on the canonical tag on a certain page. Usually you will have the canonical tag added to a page when it's generating duplicate content--and you want that page to be considered to be "combined" with the page you're "canonicaling" to.
So, if you have a product that comes in several colors, those "color" pages will canonical back to the main product page.
The meta noindex, follow tag really shouldn't be used in most cases, if you're going to stop the search engines from indexing a page on your site, you should consider if you really need that page on the site anyway.
In the screen shot you provide, you're not giving me enough information about which pages on your site you're canonicaling from--so I can't give you specific advice on that. But to answer your question, these settings can definitely affect rankings.
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
-
Duplicate Content/Missing Meta Description | Pages DO NOT EXISIT!
Hello all, For the last few months, Moz has been showing us that our site has roughly 2,000 duplicate content errors. Pages that were actually duplicate content, I took care of accordingly using best practice (301 redirects, canonicalization,etc.). Still remaining after these fixes were errors showing for pages that we have never created. Our homepage is www.primepay.com. An example of pages that are being shown as duplicate content is http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/payroll/online-payroll with a referring page of http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/online-payroll. Some of these are even now showing up as 403 and 404 errors. The only real page on our site within that URL strand is primepay.com/payroll or primepay.com/payroll/online-payroll. Therefore, I am not sure where Moz is getting these pages from. Another issue we are having in relation to duplicate content is that moz is showing old campaign url’s tacked on to our blog page i.e. http://primepay.com/blog?title=&page=2&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogCTA&utm_campaign=IRSblogpost&qt-blog_tabs=1. As of this morning, our duplicate content went from 2,000 to 18,000. I exported all of our crawl diagnostics data and looked to see what the referring pages were, and even they are not pages that we have created. When you click on these links, they take you to a random point in time from the homepage of our blog; some dating back to 2010. I checked our crawl stats in both Google and Bing’s Webmaster tool, and there are no duplicate content or 400 level errors being reporting from their crawl. My team is truly at a loss with trying to resolve this issue and any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | PrimePay0 -
Spammy Directories Using Title Meta-Tag For Link
I've been noticing a growing amount of spammy directories using my title Meta-Tag to create a link back to my site. Since my title uses competitive keywords, these external links on spammy directories look over optimized and I fear an algo penalty might get triggered. Should I be concerned and what can I do?
Moz Pro | | alrockn0 -
Moz says I am missing titles and meta tags and have duplicate content
I just redesigned my website and suddenly traffic has dropped. Moz says I am missing titles, meta tag descriptions and have a lot of duplicate content. My site is http://skigenie.com and is full of unique and hand written content,. Are there any wordpress plugins that will add titles etc to my pages (some of the added ones are custom)? Any help would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | flexy0 -
Does the page authority data also considers the on page factors like the presence of keyword in the title,meta text, and keyword frequency ??
The moz difficulty score considers four factors for the top websites. are the on page factors included in the page authority data ?
Moz Pro | | iQuanti0 -
Robots review
Anything in this that would have caused Rogerbot to stop indexing my site? It only saw 34 of 5000+ pages on the last pass. It had no problems seeing the whole site before. User-agent: Rogerbot Disallow: /default.aspx?*
Moz Pro | | sprynewmedia
//Keep from crawling the CMS urls default.aspx?Tabid=234. Real home page is home.aspx Disallow: /ctl/
// Keep from indexing the admin controls Disallow: ArticleAdmin
// Keep from indexing article admin page Disallow: articleadmin
// same in lower case Disallow: /images/
// Keep from indexing CMS images Disallow: captcha
// keep from indexing the captcha image which appears to be a page to crawls. general rules lacking wildcards User-agent: * Disallow: /default.aspx Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /DesktopModules/DnnForge - NewsArticles/Controls/ImageChallenge.captcha.aspx0 -
Does the SEOMoz weekly crawl that highlights no meta description tag, take into account if there is a meta robots noindex,follow tag on the pages it indicates the missing meta descriptions?
The weekly crawl website report is telling me that there are pages that have missing meta description tags, yet I've implemented meta robots tags to 'noindex, follow' those pages which are visible in those page source files. As far as Google Is concerned, surely this then won't be a problem since it is being instructed NOT to consider these specific pages for indexing. I am assuming that the weekly SEOmoz website crawl is simply throwing the missing meta description crawl findings into its report without itself observing that the particluar URL references contain the meta robots 'noindex,follow' tag ???? Appreciate if you can clairfy if this is the case. It would help me understand that (at least in terms of my efforts towards Google) your own crawl doesn't observe the meta robots tag instruction, hence the resultant report's flagging the discrepancy.
Moz Pro | | callassist0 -
How to get rid of the message "Search Engine blocked by robots.txt"
During the Crawl Diagnostics of my website,I got a message Search Engine blocked by robots.txt under Most common errors & warnings.Please let me know the procedure by which the SEOmoz PRO Crawler can completely crawl my website?Awaiting your reply at the earliest. Regards, Prashakth Kamath
Moz Pro | | 1prashakth0 -
Why does the crawl report say I should have meta description and title tags in my xml files?
Just had my first crawl report today which has been very useful in finding missing and duplicated title tags and meta descriptions but it has flagged up the fact that my xml files are missing these. Surely non HTML documents shouldn't have them (or need them) so why are they showing up in the report?
Moz Pro | | PandyLegend0