Noindex, nofollow on a blog since 2009
-
Just reviewed a WordPress blog that was launched in 2009 but somehow the privacy setting was to not index it, so all this time there's been a noindex, nofollow meta tag in the header. The client couldn't figure out why masses of content wasn't showing up in search results.
I've fixed the setting and assume Google will spider in short order; the blog is a subdirectory of their main site. My question is whether there is anything else I can or should do. Can Google recognize the age of the content, or that it once had a noindex meta tag? Will it "date" the blog as of today? Has the client lost out on untold benefits from the long history of content creation? I imagine that link juice from any backlinks to the blog will now flow back to the main site; think that's true?
Just curious what others might think of this scenario and whether any other action is warranted.
-
Thanks Dan. One thing I found interesting is that Google Webmaster Tools doesn't offer any alerts about pages that aren't indexed because of meta tags, only about those included in the robots.txt file.
-
Hi
Great responses Matt and Ben, thanks!! Only things I could add are;
Webmaster Tools
- Check google webmaster tools every few days for the first 2-3 weeks.
- You may turn up some 404s or other types of errors that should be corrected.
- And keep your eyes out for any other warnings
Analytics
- You're going to spike your traffic (potentially, hopefully) in analytics big time, or at least skew the data
- Use filters and advanced segments to separate blog traffic so you can still analyze things even after a potential spike in blog search traffic.
- At minimum make an annotation of the date you made it indexable.
Dates
- Regarding the dates, I did come across this recently - I have not tested, so please take it with a grain of salt - removing dates from the SERPs - I would only recommend trying it if the content was not "time sensitive" (like a cooking recipe).
Hope all this helps!
-Dan
-
Thanks for the clarification Ben. I think I'll leave older posts as is. They've been actively posting several times a week, so there should be enough fresh content. My hope is that Google recognizes the age of the blog because it's my understanding that age factors in the ranking algorithm.
-
Ahh yeah my bad, ignore that bit. I think you'd still want to make a subtle change to each post so WordPress can set the date updated flag on the sitemap to today, that way Google will put a higher priority on the content when indexing your site.
-
Thanks, the site maps are a good idea. Ben, I'm not sure what you mean about making the content different to what Google has in its index. Because of the meta tag, it doesn't have any content in its index, right?
-
You've done the most important step (removing the noindex/nofollow) tags. The only additional thing I would do is submit (or resubmit) the XML sitemap to Google. Make sure that XML sitemap is perfect and error free so that you don't create any additional errors.
Google should be smart enough to recognize the dates. I've never had a situation where it was years between publish and index. I have however had situations where it was days or weeks in between publish and index and in those situations Google has recognize the date. I'd imagine the same is true here (assuming of course, you have the date in a recognizable format and don't change the date to today).
I'd be curious to find out what happens. Definitely update this Q&A when you find out what happens!
-
I would probably re-arrange some of the paragraphs (or add some more content) to the old posts and update them in WordPress, this then makes the content different to what Google has in its index.
I would then use the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin to regenerate your sitemap. Since you've updated and added new content to the posts their last updated date would have changed so Google will probably see this as revised content. I would submit to all major search engines as your first port of call.
In terms of the "link juice", I would say that Google will still count links to the article as a ranking factor, but because you have noindex the content wont appear in search results. So the content will have a fairly good page rank (possibly) but its being held back by the exclusion of the search engine index.
Now that the setting has been changed and the sitemap / content has been updated you should start to see the results in the search results in due time.
You could also add a few new articles of content to the blog and publicise that over social media to help get back in the game a bit quicker.
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
-
No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
Pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. The page below in search console shows the error above...
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
"Ghost" errors on blog structured data?
Hi, I'm working on a blog which Search Console account advises me about a big bunch of errors on its structured data: Structured data - graphics Structured data - hentry list Structured data - detail But I get to https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ and it tells me "all is ok": Structured data - test Any clue? Thanks in advance, F0NE5lz.png hm7IBtV.png aCRJdJO.jpg 15SRo93.jpg
Technical SEO | | Webicultors0 -
Optimizing blog domain for maximum rank/traffic potential
Hello wonderful Moz community! I need some advice. Here is the situation: I work in a small division within a much larger company. We each have our own domain, i.e. www.parent.com and www.child.com. We (the child) have a domain authority of 57, while our parent has a domain authority of 86. Our blog lives on blogs.parent.com/child. My understanding is that www.brand.com/blogs is better for SEO than blogs.brand.com (we had no control of directory structure decisions at the parent level). Given all that, in terms of maximizing traffic to our domain, would we be better off moving our blog to www.child.com/blogs? Here are a couple of potential pros/cons bouncing around in my newbie brain: a) By moving the blog to our domain, our whole site could benefit from having any external links our blog posts earn point back to our domain vs. our parent's domain. b) On the other hand, leaving the blog on our parent's domain and then linking to our content from posts over there might give our content a boost. (Of course, that theory is shot down if Google recognizes our parent/child relationship and doesn't reward our site with the benefit of linkbacks coming from our parent domain.) What say you? Are there other angles to this I’m not even considering? If you think the right decision is to move the blog over to our site, any suggestions on how not to screw that up? (301’s, etc.) Thanks in advance for your thoughts! -John
Technical SEO | | jomosi0 -
We have 302 redirect links on our forum that point to individual posts. Should we add a rel="nofollow" to these links?
Moz is showing us that we have a HUGE amount of 302 redirects. These are coming from our community forum. Forum URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/ Example thread URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewthread/322/ Example URL that points to a specific reply: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewreply/1582/ The above link 302 redirects to this URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewthread/322/#1582 My two questions would be: Do you think we should we add rel=nofollow to the specific reply URLs? If possible, should we make those redirects 301 vs. 302? Screencast attached. nofollow_302.mp4
Technical SEO | | Bjork1 -
Adding an SEO Friendly Blog Module
Hi, Our website is developed in .NET. We need to add a new "out the box" blog module. Is there such a thing as a blog module that is good for SEO. For example updatable Page Titles and Title Tags etc. If so can anyone recommend one Thanks Andrew
Technical SEO | | Studio330 -
35% Drop In Traffic Since March 23 2012
Hi, I am aware ofth e penguin and panda updates and have been monitoring my traffic for the last few months. I did notice that for some reason, from about 22nd / 23rd March we had a drop in traffic by about 50%, it stabilised in a few days but since then from april to present has been hovering around 35% drop in traffic. what perplexes me is hat I also monitored our rankings and that was fine, pretty much the same, yet traffic is down. I have noticed our longer tail keywords have lost traffic by as much as 60-900% I would really appreciate some input, do you think this could be down to panda pulling pages out. how can i find track pages indexesd for my site over time to see if this is where he problem is. I havea lso noticed that in webamster tools, a domain preferance is not set, it is set to default "do not set a preferred domain", would this not cause a dup content issue, what should it be set to, post panda? Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is really hurting our business. thanks you in advance
Technical SEO | | LiquidTech0 -
Crawl Errors for duplicate titles/content when canonicalised or noindexed
Hi there, I run an ecommerce store and we've recently started changing the way we handle pagination links and canonical links. We run Magento, so each category eg /shoes has a number of parameters and pages depending on the number of products in the category. For example /shoes?mode=grid will display products in grid view, /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 is page 2 in grid mode. Previously, all URL variations per category were canonicalised to /shoes. Now, we've been advised to paginate the base URLs with page number only. So /shoes has a pagination next link to /shoes?p=2, page 2 has a prev link to /shoes and a next link to /shoes?p=3. When any other parameter is introduced (such as mode=grid) we canonicalise that back to the main category URL of /shoes and put a noindex meta tag on the page. However, SEOMoz is picking up duplicate title warnings for urls like /shoes?p=2 and /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 despite the latter being canonicalised and having a noindex tag. Presumably search engines will look at the canonical and the noindex tag so this shouldn't be an issue. Is that correct, or should I be concerned by these errors? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Fergus_Macdonald0