Meta tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident
-
Hi,
3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google.
I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy".
So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards?
Thanks,
Sven
-
I uploaded the sitemap, let's hope in a few days everything will be normal again and that I'll will regain my PR1 keyword.
Thanks John, and Ryan for your correction!
-
Reconsideration requests are for when Google removes a site from it's index for spam or other reasons. There would not be any reason to use one in this instance.
First and foremost, fix the setting. Then verify the noindex tag is removed by visiting a few of your site's pages. Right-click, choose View Page Source and ensure the tag is gone.
Next, as John suggested create a fresh site map and submit it to Google. Log into Google WMT to ensure they have received the updated map. Since this is a new site and you seem anxious to fix this issue, take a moment and check your robots.txt file from Google WMT to ensure there are not any issues.
If your site is large, it may take time for all your pages to re-appear. If your site is small, you will see results faster.
If there is any 1 or 2 articles you feel are critically important to be indexed fast, then I would suggest tweeting a link for the page to help increase it's visibility to Google. I have no knowledge of this working but I even heard of a person tweeting a link to their site map to get indexed faster. I have no idea if it worked but I love the creativity.
Good luck.
-
Do you have a Google account with Webmaster Tools? If not, go ahead and sign up for one (it's free!) then submit your site for reconsideration to Google. While you're at it, make sure your XML site map is working. You should be back on Google within a few days to a week.
It sounds like this is a short-term nofollow situation, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
-John
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
-
ALT tags - How important are they?
I realise ALT tags are important from an accessibility perspective but in terms of organic search, do they carry much value? I have a big site and it doesn't look like ALT tags have been added generally, it would be a massive job to fix and I'm just trying to weigh up what to concentrate on first. Does anybody have any real life experience?
Technical SEO | | seoman100 -
Leveraging "Powered by" and link spam
Hi all, For reference: The SaaS guide to leveraging the "Powered By" tactic. My product is an embeddable widget that customers place on their websites (see example referenced in link above). A lot of my customers have great domain authority (big brands, .gov's etc). I would like to use a "Powered By" link on my widgets to create high quality backlinks. My question is: if I have identical link text (on potentially hundreds) of widgets, will this look like link spam to Google? If so, would setting the link text randomly on each widget to one of a few different phrases (to create some variation) avoid this? Hope this makes sense, thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | NoorHammad0 -
Lost with conical, nofollow noindex. Not sure how to use it on a dyanmic php site with multiple region select options
I have a site with multiple regions the main page after a region is selected is login.php but the regions are defined by ?rid=11 , 12, etc. These are being picked up as duplicate content but they are all different regions. As i hired external php coders to develop most of the site I am scared to start meddling with any of the raw code and would like some advise on how to not show these as duplicate content. should i use noindex nofollow or connical? if Connical how do i set it up on the main login.php page? p.s. i am an extreme nube to seo
Technical SEO | | moby1230 -
Is a Rel="cacnonical" page bad for a google xml sitemap
Back in March 2011 this conversation happened. Rand: You don't want rel=canonicals. Duane: Only end state URL. That's the only thing I want in a sitemap.xml. We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it's really critical that they understand that this isn't something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error. Is this the same with Google?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?
This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files." Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post." Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down. My question is two parts: 1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed? 2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script? 3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page? Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Help with Webmaster Tools "Not Followed" Errors
I have been doing a bunch of 301 redirects on my site to address 404 pages and in each case I check the redirect to make sure it works. I have also been using tools like Xenu to make sure that I'm not linking to 404 or 301 content from my site. However on Friday I started getting "Not Followed" errors in GWT. When I check the URL that they tell me provided the error it seems to redirect correctly. One example is this... http://www.mybinding.com/.sc/ms/dd/ee/48738/Astrobrights-Pulsar-Pink-10-x-13-65lb-Cover-50pk I tried a redirect tracer and it reports the redirect correctly. Fetch as googlebot returns the correct page. Fetch as bing bot in the new bing webmaster tools shows that it redirects to the correct page but there is a small note that says "Status: Redirection limit reached". I see this on all of the redirects that I check in the bing webmaster portal. Do I have something misconfigured. Can anyone give me a hint on how to troubleshoot this type of issue. Thanks, Jeff
Technical SEO | | mybinding10 -
Meta keywords
I heard that Google doesn't use 'meta keywords' for ranking. Is that true and does it harm to use the meta tag? And how do the other big SEs use the tag?
Technical SEO | | kortingsplanet0 -
I am wondering if I should use the Meta 'Cache" tag?
I am working on removing unnecessary meta tags that have little impact on SEO and I have read so many mixed reviews about using the Meta 'Cache' tag. I need to informative information on whether or not this tag should be used.
Technical SEO | | ImagetecLP0