Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?
-
Hi,
We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as:
on all of the site.
I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass.
So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc.
And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site).
Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/
I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting.
And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing.
Cheers,
-
Can't answer the API question I'm afraid.
However on the other bits - if you don't specify robots directive, search engines are likely to behave in the default manner - i.e. index, follow unless you're blocking them another way (i.e. robots.txt)
A good test of this would be if you've launched a page since the 17th and it's not in Google's index and you know you've been crawled.
Check in GWT for your crawl data - and don't worry about the cache because your users will always be taken to the current version of your site. It's only a concern if you're no longer being crawled.
If it's an ecommerce site, then it should just be one site-wide tweak to put index,follow back in. Re-create and re-submit your sitemap.xml to GWT then Google will go after all your new content as well - i.e. it hurries up re-crawling.
Hoping something helped you there
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
-
Robots.txt allows wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Hello, Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin
I noticed something peculiar in the robots.txt used by one of my clients: Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php What would be the purpose of allowing a search engine to crawl this file?
Is it OK? Should I do something about it?
Everything else on /wp-admin/ is disallowed.
Thanks in advance for your help.
-AK:2 -
How to fix: Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point.
Hello, HTML validator brings "Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point" for all my meta tags. Yet, as I understand, it is essential to keep meta-description for SEO, for example. I read a couple of articles on how to fix that and one of them suggests considering HTML5 custom data attribute instead of name: Do you think I should try to validate my page? And instead of ? I will appreciate your advise very much!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Yoast and wordpress duplicate meta
I'm using the Yoast plugin with wordpress and have noticed in my HTML I have duplicate meta data. For example my header starts with
Technical SEO | | simonatkinsphoto
<title>(title) </title<span><<br /><meta </span><span class="html-attribute-name">property</span><span>="</span><span class="html-attribute-value">og:site_name</span><span>" </span><span class="html-attribute-name">content</span><span>=<br /><span><meta </span><span class="html-attribute-name">property</span><span>="</span><span class="html-attribute-value">og:description</span><span>" </span><span class="html-attribute-name">content</span><span>=<br /><br /></span></span>Then I have the 'This site is optimised by Yoast" tagline followed by the same meta -<br /> <span><meta </span><span class="html-attribute-name">name</span><span>="</span><span class="html-attribute-value">description</span><span>" </span><span class="html-attribute-name">content=<br /><span> <meta </span><span class="html-attribute-name">property</span><span>="</span><span class="html-attribute-value">og:title</span><span>" content=<br /><span> <meta </span><span class="html-attribute-name">property</span><span>="</span><span class="html-attribute-value">og:description</span><span>" </span><span class="html-attribute-name">content=<br /><span> <meta </span><span class="html-attribute-name">property</span><span>="</span><span class="html-attribute-value">og:site_name</span><span>" </span><span class="html-attribute-name">content</span><span>=<br /><br /></span></span></span></span>Is this likely to cause problems with Google and is there a way to stop both wordpress and Yoast adding meta to the header. </p></title>0 -
How are Server side redirects perceived compared to direct links (on a Directory site)
Hi, Im creating some listings for a client on a relevant b2b directory (a good quality directory) I asked if the links are 'followed' or no 'followed' and they said they are 'server side redirects' so no direct links. Does anyone know how these are likely to be perceived by Google ? All BEst Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Robots.txt blocking Addon Domains
I have this site as my primary domain: http://www.libertyresourcedirectory.com/ I don't want to give spiders access to the site at all so I tried to do a simple Disallow: / in the robots.txt. As a test I tried to crawl it with Screaming Frog afterwards and it didn't do anything. (Excellent.) However, there's a problem. In GWT, I got an alert that Google couldn't crawl ANY of my sites because of robots.txt issues. Changing the robots.txt on my primary domain, changed it for ALL my addon domains. (Ex. http://ethanglover.biz/ ) From a directory point of view, this makes sense, from a spider point of view, it doesn't. As a solution, I changed the robots.txt file back and added a robots meta tag to the primary domain. (noindex, nofollow). But this doesn't seem to be having any effect. As I understand it, the robots.txt takes priority. How can I separate all this out to allow domains to have different rules? I've tried uploading a separate robots.txt to the addon domain folders, but it's completely ignored. Even going to ethanglover.biz/robots.txt gave me the primary domain version of the file. (SERIOUSLY! I've tested this 100 times in many ways.) Has anyone experienced this? Am I in the twilight zone? Any known fixes? Thanks. Proof I'm not crazy in attached video. robotstxt_addon_domain.mp4
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Best use of robots.txt for "garbage" links from Joomla!
I recently started out on Seomoz and is trying to make some cleanup according to the campaign report i received. One of my biggest gripes is the point of "Dublicate Page Content". Right now im having over 200 pages with dublicate page content. Now.. This is triggerede because Seomoz have snagged up auto generated links from my site. My site has a "send to freind" feature, and every time someone wants to send a article or a product to a friend via email a pop-up appears. Now it seems like the pop-up pages has been snagged by the seomoz spider,however these pages is something i would never want to index in Google. So i just want to get rid of them. Now to my question I guess the best solution is to make a general rule via robots.txt, so that these pages is not indexed and considered by google at all. But, how do i do this? what should my syntax be? A lof of the links looks like this, but has different id numbers according to the product that is being send: http://mywebshop.dk/index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=39&tmpl=component&Itemid=167 I guess i need a rule that grabs the following and makes google ignore links that contains this: view=send_friend
Technical SEO | | teleman0 -
What if meta description tag comes before meta title tag? Do the search engines disregard or penalize if the order is not title then description in the HTML?
Do the search engines disregard or penalize if the order is not title then description in the HTML? A client's webmaster is a newbie to SEO and did just this. Suggestions?
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Trying to reduce pages crawled to within 10K limit via robots.txt
Our site has far too many pages for our 10K page PRO account which are not SEO worthy. In fact, only about 2000 pages qualify for SEO value. Limitations of the store software only permit me to use robots.txt to sculpt the rogerbot site crawl. However, I am having trouble getting this to work. Our biggest problem is the 35K individual product pages and the related shopping cart links (at least another 35K); these aren't needed as they duplicate the SEO-worthy content in the product category pages. The signature of a product page is that it is contained within a folder ending in -p. So I made the following addition to robots.txt: User-agent: rogerbot
Technical SEO | | AspenFasteners
Disallow: /-p/ However, the latest crawl results show the 10K limit is still being exceeded. I went to Crawl Diagnostics and clicked on Export Latest Crawl to CSV. To my dismay I saw the report was overflowing with product page links: e.g. www.aspenfasteners.com/3-Star-tm-Bulbing-Type-Blind-Rivets-Anodized-p/rv006-316x039354-coan.htm The value for the column "Search Engine blocked by robots.txt" = FALSE; does this mean blocked for all search engines? Then it's correct. If it means "blocked for rogerbot? Then it shouldn't even be in the report, as the report seems to only contain 10K pages. Any thoughts or hints on trying to attain my goal would REALLY be appreciated, I've been trying for weeks now. Honestly - virtual beers for everyone! Carlo0